The Liquid material now actually refracts.
Two ways to get it
Installer: Aero.Dock_1.2.2_x64-setup.exe. Per user, no admin rights.
Portable: Aero.Dock_1.2.2_x64-portable.zip. Unpack it anywhere and run Aero Dock.exe.
Windows will show a SmartScreen box either way, because the build is not code signed. Click More info, then Run anyway.
What changed
Liquid used to only blur, which is frosted plastic rather than glass. It now bends what sits behind it, through a displacement map generated for each surface. Three passes at slightly different strengths give the colour fringing real glass has at its edges. The technique comes from "Liquid Glass in CSS and SVG" by ekino.
Refraction can only bend what is already there, and a smooth gradient bends into another smooth gradient, so the bubbles behind the settings cards are much bigger now. Watch a card edge as one passes behind it.
Those bubbles are also held still, and the travelling light sweep stands down while Liquid is on. Anything moving behind a refracting card makes it redraw on every frame, and that costs more than the motion is worth. With the dock asleep, the settings window sits at about 4.5% of one core with every card refracting.
What the dock gets
The dock cannot refract, and that is not a setting anyone can change. A backdrop filter bends what is painted behind it inside the page, and the dock is a transparent window, so Windows never gives it the desktop pixels.
It gets the rest of the treatment: one continuous inner glow instead of a top bevel, no gloss cap, and more transparency. Memory is unchanged, still about 140 MB once the dock has been left alone for a minute.
Settings, then Theme, sets the material for each window separately.
Full changelog: v1.2.1...v1.2.2