All the Liquid Glass Changes in macOS Golden Gate

[Luftkopf]

It is likely that Apple only changed it because of actual average consumers complaining, not because of people on forum sites or Reddit. I would not call these consumers "haters", they do not usually think about things like this unless it is truly bothersome. I know for sure that in my own experience, mostly in the workplace, non-techie people are not very pleased with the way LG was implemented in both iOS and macOS. I did not hear anywhere near this level of discontent when iOS 7 and Yosemite came out.

I believe Apple products are as successful as they are because they are easy to use and understand for people who are not technically inclined, especially the iPhone, and a lot of the people I've worked with don't even know the control center exists. Yet this was the first time I ever heard them complain.

That hasn’t been my experience. The only complaints I ever heard about Tahoe were online.

What haters? Hating what exactly? It sounds like you’re hating the “haters” which seems ironical.

Have you been on this forum at all in the past year? I’ve been sitting here, enjoying Tahoe, wishing Liquid Glass had gone further while there were innumerable hate threads being posted whinging about every aspect of appleOS 26!

If you don’t like it, that’s fine, I don’t care. I am super annoyed that Apple has gone all weak, and walked backwards.

 

[klasma]

also i'll never understand why ya'll associate larger corner radii with being childish

Toys and utensils for small children tend to be designed with round corners and edges so that they don’t hurt themselves (and maybe also because it looks friendlier), hence the association.

And designs like these do look a bit cutesy and cartoonish:

 

[Oberhorst]

I wish they would have actually refined Liquid Glass instead of going back to the old sidebar and corner radius. The new (old) sidebar feels completely out of place with the rest of Liquid Glass. I also liked how the content next to the sidebar changed its colors.

The different window corner radius was there for a reason and I think Tahoe looked more consistent. The old corner radius feels out of place with the buttons of the toolbar.

The word is concentricity (corner elements share the same centre). Tahoe was extremely pleasant to look at from an UI perspective because of it (even though you and I seem to be the only people in this forum who appreciated it). All the radii played well together and looked great with round icons and similar elements.
Now it looks inconsistent and broken, like an UI mistake from a design intern.

 

[neuropsychguy]

Biggest problem: With large radius corners, 75% of the draggable corner area you used to resize them was literally outside the rendered window.

Why It’s Difficult to Resize Windows on MacOS 26 Dyehoe

https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe/

daringfireball.net

That's interesting. I've never had any difficulty resizing the windows from corners in macOS 26. I can see how it could be frustrating for people who are struggling with it though.

 

[Luftkopf]

Toys and utensils for small children tend to be designed with round corners and edges so that they don’t hurt themselves (and maybe also because it looks friendlier), hence the association.

View attachment 2636785

And designs like these do look a bit cutesy and cartoonish:

View attachment 2636783

And it was the epithet of choice for OS X 10.0 too. The evidently now beloved Aqua was routinely described as the Fisher Price OS back in its day.

 

[CrabQueenInc]

I'm not a fan of the icons, but they don't bug me nearly as much as the rounded corners everywhere in menues. In Tahoe, the menu title (e.g., "File", "Edit"), the drop down menu, and the selected menu item all have four rounded corners, making them look like disconnected elements. I hope they bring back the previous appearance, where a menu title and its drop-down items appear connected.

View attachment 2636726View attachment 2636727

I thought that I was the only one wishing for a return to these sensible drop-down menus. 🥲 Maybe one day Apple will come to its senses when the designers get bored of every element being pill-shaped and disconnected.

 

[capamac]

Taking corners to an extreme, it's possible to make corners so big and puffy that a single finder window fill the entire dislplay and yet still lacks enough room to display any folder contents. Coz the corners are so huge. This is the world the Tahoe people want.

 

[dpfenninger]

Wish they wouldn't even call it Liquid Glass at this point...all that super liquid-y, glass-y stuff shown at WWDC25 has been neutered to the point where it's just a simple frosted look anymore. I, for one, really liked the transparency and rarely had any issues with readability, but now it feels like the look of it has lost all of its unique character that we saw in those early forms of LG. Hoping that they amp up the transparency on the left side of that slider, as it's too subtle a change as it appears in this first beta.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Now it looks inconsistent and broken, like an UI mistake from a design intern.

Nah, that's literally how I'd describe Tahoe and the 26 OSes in general.

 

[MadDawg2020]

having all this ability to adjust everything doesn’t mean a thing until the fix the abysmal control panel so you can actually find what you are trying to adjust!
It’s not like they have not had time to fix this since Apple introduced a system control panel back when the original finder was introduced back in 1984!

 

[rocketz]

Thank god, they got rid of the PlaySkool rounded corners, I'll finally update from Sequoia....

It got better for sure, but I still prefer Sequoia.. This is Tahoe (inner), Golden Gate (middle), and Sequoia (outer).

Still too rounded, but I'll probably upgrade to GG now with this change and the other LG fixes

 

[turbineseaplane]

It got better for sure, but I still prefer Sequoia.. This is Tahoe (inner), Golden Gate (middle), and Sequoia (outer).

View attachment 2636805

Still too rounded, but I'll probably upgrade to GG now with this change and the other LG fixes

Agreed. Sequoia is still better, but I'll take anything I can get that backs off the Fisher-Price-Tahoe overly rounded look.

 

[capamac]

I have a 13" Air. I really don't need huge corners gobbling up hundreds of pixels worth of valuable screen real estate.

 

[Luftkopf]

Apple: Fisher Price OS since 2001.

This is only beta 1, let's see how this all shakes out by September.

 

[retta283]

It got better for sure, but I still prefer Sequoia.. This is Tahoe (inner), Golden Gate (middle), and Sequoia (outer).

View attachment 2636805

Still too rounded, but I'll probably upgrade to GG now with this change and the other LG fixes

In my opinion even Sequoia is already too rounded. While mostly tolerable, I believe if you are going to round windows at all it should be at an absolute minimum or the rounding should be applied only to a window frame (like Windows 7, where the inner window contents are still squared off).

What informs my opinion here is that there are programs I use at work to remote into Windows and Linux systems, and the rounded corners cause the bottom corners to be clipped off, in Tahoe it got bad enough that the Start button on the left was shrunken to a very small clickable area. When some fullscreen programs are in use, I have been actually unable to use some buttons altogether in Tahoe. This was always a problem though, even in Catalina days but then the losses were only a few pixels and effectively cosmetic in issue.

Of course I understand why people like some degree of rounding but Tahoe took it way too far, GG is a massive improvement. At least things won't feel so cramped anymore.

 

[rocketz]

I have a 13" Air. I really don't need huge corners gobbling up hundreds of pixels worth of valuable screen real estate.

It's stupid - wastes so much space. Looks ugly and introduces the right-corner-resize issue. So a change introduced for looks only with noone putting any thought into it. Hopefully all the people responsible for this are at Meta now.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

I hope they provide a way to disable HDR UI like on iOS because this sucks

 

[johnrlaporta]

I’m hard pressed to see the difference in the article’s screen shots.

 

[CrabQueenInc]

Thanks to the author for the good summary, both of last year's reaction on MacRumors and the response.

Very smart of them to put that apology segment right at the front of the keynote, addressing practically all the main concerns around Tahoe's appearance, some with genuine backtracking. My attitude was never "Apple's going off the rails" as I observed from others, but certainly was a "well, here we go with the overzealous year before things settle down a little." It's been a long year that way, but happily, the settling-down has been prompter and more decisive than I'd hoped. It's a relief.

Starfia, you responded to me a few weeks ago in another thread with a very thoughtful response. I took your opinion to heart and waited to see if there really were people still within Apple that cared about macOS.

Now that the WWDC keynote is over, I want to say thank you for that reply. While I think that Apple still needs to sweat the small details in the macOS UI, Golden Gate has restored a little of my lost confidence in Apple’s ability to design a user-centric OS.

 

[diblasio]

We've been able to hide them in Tahoe with a command line. Still works in Golden Gate.

Hide macOS Tahoe’s Menu Icons With This One Simple Trick

I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them...

512pixels.net

OMG I DIDNT EVEN NOTICE THIS AND NOW ITS ALL I *CAN* NOTICE I HATE YALL! 😭

 

[Mr. Awesome]

They definitely touched up the actual appearance of glass components a ton. They look way closer to the original WWDC25 previews and the edges feel like they're actually refracting light now. Much less of the "floating bubbles that cast a weird drop shadow" that Tahoe had. Heavy aqua vibes and it's borderline lickable.

 

[Luftkopf]

Starfia, you responded to me a few weeks ago in another thread with a very thoughtful response. I took your opinion to heart and waited to see if there really were people still within Apple that cared about macOS.

Now that the WWDC keynote is over, I want to say thank you for that reply. While I think that Apple still needs to sweat the small details in the macOS UI, Golden Gate has restored a little of my lost confidence in Apple’s ability to design a user-centric OS.

Well it's killed mine. This is such a weak move from Apple. They had an idea, and instead of iterating it until is was awesome, they immediately started walking it back. This sucks now.

 

[superarijit]

One only needs to know that the creator of Liquid Glass has been fired.

 

[krakenrelease]

Software quality going downhill. These "changes" should have been implemented in the original release. How can you release a UI where corners are different and non uniform?

That's great they fixed the UI styling they introduced. Now fix the underlying issues that have popped up that I did NOT have issues with on Sequoia. Multiple logins show different title bar icons, bluetooth issues, etc. These will never be fixed sadly. We will get a new OS release with more shiny crap that glosses over the turds of bugs.

 

[teaneedz]

Not enough Liquid Glass! The slider is basically Frosted Glass high or mid. Terrible downgrade in UI, I want a more transparent Liquid Glass option like the initial beta last year.

I'm glad they made the icons more Liquid Glass at least.

UI best practice actually leans toward less glass. Opaque is the user friendly UI and falls into function over form. Transparency is the poor UI choice.