All the Liquid Glass Changes in macOS Golden Gate

[aapl owner]

How very misleading "Sidebar icons have color again, which is something Apple removed in macOS Tahoe." No the sidebar gained a single measly color - the same color for all icons which is nearly worthless because it doesn't distinguish between icons. Why can't each icon have a different color like old Mac OS-X had for generations?
Apple still refuses to acknowledge that people use color to differentiate items in the sidebar. Utterly silly and childish UI design continues at Apple, maybe MacOS40 will fix this. It's amusing to hear these guys present since every time they make a UI change they tell us how much better it is but then change it back a few years later. It's reminds me of the book 1984 and the ever increasing amounts of chocolate people receive (hint: the quantity never truly increases its just propaganda).

 

[steve333]

UX Practitioner here.

For iPads/iPhones, the whole point of accessibility is to lower the barrier for anyone to use a product, by making these changes, we've lost so much legibility and clarity Apple has followed on - for years. Basically alienating customers who need to actually read stuff or do stuff. I'm 30 and struggle to read the time on my iPhone.

For Macs, these changes in the Liquid Glass made the interface take 20% more space and improved virtually nothing. The changes would make sense if the interfaces are touch-first, which they're not. This changes are welcomed but are short steps going in the obvious direction...

That direction is simply using more proved UI. Because, go figure, UX laws apply because we'll still be humans, and humans experience the world in a specific way.

I had bought a new Mac mini a few months before Tahoe and I was happy with it.
Then I made the mistake of downloading Tahoe and suddenly for the first time in my long Mac life I couldn't see anything clearly, I have astigmatism.
I had to do a search to see what settings to change and for the first time ever had to increase the contrast on my new Monitor.
I wanted to throw the computer through my window. Worst Mac experience ever and Apple tweaking the crap that is Liquid Glass without giving an option to turn it completely off is still a fail.
The rounded tabs in Safari also ruined the best looking browser out there.

 

[antmarobel]

Some curious informations. I installed on a previous version of Sequoia (Tahoe was driving me insane). Well, Marine Aquarium screensaver working fine, Backgrounds working fine, all versions of Audirvana (including the oooooold Audirvana Plus 3.2.15. The 3.2.15 I installed on Golden Gate itself, it was not previous installed on Sequoia because of the constant crashes and, SURPRISE, not a single crash (2 hours already listen to my favorites pops), Forecast Bar 5.2.2 working fine. The only app not working is App Cleaner & Uninstall, current version. And since I decided to install it over Sequoia (and on Sequoia the option of changing the wallpapers using my pictures folders (one for Landscapes and cities collected on Flickr, other for my own pictures, yet another one for movie stars) was active and working, now it is working on macOS 27 too. So, after all such great progress 😀

 

[TMRJIJ]

Exhibit A

View attachment 2636770

That looks more like pre-iOS 6 than anything else

 

[aapl owner]

Sooo we are just going back to Mac OS Sonoma.... why did you put us through this pain Apple? Why?!!!

Apple does this all the time and its amusing because a person comes on stage and tells us about the great new UI change and how much better it is and then a couple years later will revert back to the older version and once again telling us how this "new" change is great. The propaganda is rather silly. Recent MacOS UI is a newer iteration of the old OS-X Aqua from 15 years ago, but Aqua made much better use of colors, which the new Apple UI designers seem to hate, and was much more pleasant to use.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

I still prefer pre-Big Sur Aqua where there's a dedicated title bar and the active window is very obvious with a dark shade of gray. Big Sur and later is too blindingly white

In apps where a title bar is appropriate, there's still a slight difference in the shade of the title bar versus the portion of the window below it, which helps show the user where they can click and hold to drag the window, but unfortunately the difference between these two shades is sometimes very minimal, like in TextEdit, especially in Dark Mode.

 

[Killa78]

Happy to upgrade from 15 to GG and totally ignore the dark age that was tahoe

Bit melodramatic...

 

[johnsawyercjs]

This was, happily, addressed directly in the developer keynote. It sounds like icons in menus will be hidden by default, and developers can opt in system-provided icons for important actions.

Oddly, some non-Apple apps by default still contain a few icons in some of their menus, but these now seem to be limited to using only, as you say, system-provided icons with recognized functions associated with them.

Here's one instance where Apple has retained a lot of menu icons, apparently since this menu happens to contain mostly menu items that have long had system-provided icons:

 

[insomniac86]

Crossing my fingers (but not holding my breath) that they take all of the icons out of the menus!

Terrible design to do that. The best design is for major menu items to have an icon while less popular items don’t.

EDIT: I believe the rule that was once followed was that icons worthy of an icon also had a keyboard shortcut.
Think, Save, Open, New, Print etc.

 

[TMRJIJ]

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

Can someone please explain the rounded corners thing to me and why people don’t like it?

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

They want to go back to the dark ages of Sharp edges

Research in visual cognition suggests humans often perceive sharp angles as more threatening and rounded forms as safer and more comfortable to interact with.

• Cars have fewer sharp edges than in the 1980s.
• Furniture increasingly uses softened corners.
• Consumer electronics use radiused edges.
• Mobile apps use cards with rounded corners.

This doesn’t make them “childish.” It makes them more approachable and easier on the eyes.

 

[rklaver]

Golden Gate… it’s the first macOS name that sounds a bit weird to me

I'm just going to call it MacOS GG

 

[ignatius345]

Crossing my fingers (but not holding my breath) that they take all of the icons out of the menus!

You might find this useful. Some (but not all) of them can be removed right now in Tahoe:

What to Do About Those Menu Item Icons in MacOS 26 Tahoe

If this worked to hide *all* of these cursed little turds smeared across the menu bar items of Apple’s system apps in Tahoe, this hidden preference would be a proverbial pitcher of ice water in hell. As it stands, alas, it’s more like half a glass of tepid water.

daringfireball.net

 

[ignatius345]

EDIT: Wait a moment. The Liquid Glass slider has only three positions? And the most transparent is still frosted??

I just knew it. It’s like the fake “slider” they put in the AirPods control for Adaptive Audio. It looks like a slider but it’s a fakeout becuase it only has three positions.

 

[ignatius345]

Research in visual cognition suggests humans often perceive sharp angles as more threatening and rounded forms as safer and more comfortable to interact with.

• Cars have fewer sharp edges than in the 1980s.

Cars have rounded edges for aerodynamics, not to make them look more “comfortable to interact with” -- notice also that car makers have gone to great lengths to make sure the grilles look as insanely aggressive as possible.

 

[capamac]

The Volvo 240 is an absolutely brilliant design IMO. Much better than 90% of 2026 vehicles, which are puffy, oversized, overly tall dystopian blobs with blindingly bright headlamps.

 

[BeatCrazy]

The biggest news IMO is the use of HDR for macOS elements. Long overdue and I’m looking forward to seeing the implementation.

 

[turbineseaplane]

They want to go back to the dark ages of Sharp edges

View attachment 2636892
View attachment 2636896
View attachment 2636893

Research in visual cognition suggests humans often perceive sharp angles as more threatening and rounded forms as safer and more comfortable to interact with.

• Cars have fewer sharp edges than in the 1980s.
• Furniture increasingly uses softened corners.
• Consumer electronics use radiused edges.
• Mobile apps use cards with rounded corners.

This doesn’t make them “childish.” It makes them more approachable and easier on the eyes.

And yet the movies & TV & web video content we watch for relaxation and entertainment...

Its all rectangular with squared off edges.

It doesn't seem to be "threatening" for movies and TVs.

 

[Panicing]

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.

I came here for this. Count me in the minority, but I’ve loved liquid glass and I’ve really liked macOS as it has become more iPadOS like. To me, the worst parts of liquid glass are the small corner menus like on Safari tab/options menu on iPhone. I do see some transparency issues on CarPlay and in certain windows, but overall I’m a fan of the look and design, and I’ve disagreed with the Mac blogosphere on much of this.

 

[retta283]

Oddly, some non-Apple apps by default still contain a few icons in some of their menus, but these now seem to be limited to using only, as you say, system-provided icons with recognized functions associated with them.

Here's one instance where Apple has retained a lot of menu icons, apparently since this menu happens to contain mostly menu items that have long had system-provided icons:

View attachment 2636894

Back in the day those Go icons were in color and real easy to tell apart, now they're just little glyphs. I think Mavericks was the last time they were in color. In this case I think the icons make sense but still miss the color differentiation.

 

[capamac]

Yeah the day macos is like ios is definitely the day I leave apple forever.

As Sam Tucker noted, ios is "macos for babies."

https://forums.macrumors.com/data/video/1422/1422502-c564cb6e6f54209480802359f93037ec.mp4?hash=xWTLbm9UIJ

 

[maxoakland]

It's a big improvement but there are still a lot of things that are fundamentally flawed. IMO this is what Tahoe should've looked like after the public beta. All the things they fixed were complained about during the public beta, but Apple didn't fix them, forcing Tahoe users to deal with the bad design for a whole year

I like the shiny buttons and moving away from flat design. It's kinda funny because it's basically just Aqua 2.0

 

[capamac]

The faux-3-D buttons are also flat. If you touch an Aqua faux-3-D button it's gonna feel flat.

Displays are a 2-D medial. Just like print newspapers. Print books. Print magazines. Billboards. Posters. Etc.

You can put things that have a 3-D like appearance on 'em but it's always gonna be 2-D.

Even real life buttons are often flat. For example, the buttons on my microwave are basically flat.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

Back in the day those Go icons were in color and real easy to tell apart, now they're just little glyphs. I think Mavericks was the last time they were in color. In this case I think the icons make sense but still miss the color differentiation.

Which is odd, since I thought the article says that icons in menu pulldowns will be getting their colors back.

EDIT: On reading the article again, it's in sidebars that icon colors are coming back, not pulldown menus, and those sidebar icon colors are apparently just a single color, blue in the image shown in the article.

 

[MonkeyT]

this is so interesting to me. what toy does it make it look like? why a toy? and if it does make it look like a toy, how does that impact you and your work?

Think Lego vs Duplo.

 

[maxoakland]

I have never even thought anything about the rounded corners in apps. I'm not even sure I'll even notice whatever changes they are making for this version. Once you spend a week or so with the new UI, it just becomes the norm. I didn't find LG in OS26 to be a super drastic change. I think using Dark Mode as well perhaps mitigates the change a bit.

Maybe you got used to it, but people have been complaining for a whole year. It affected a lot of people's daily work