Apple Releases First macOS Tahoe 26.3 Public Beta

[star-affinity]

First time I haven’t upgraded Mac OS by the .1 update. All the comments are still holding me back - is it really that bad?!

It's not that bad and it it's pretty stable overall for me. The problem I see is mostly visual. Attaching three examples from macOS 26.2.

The glassy background of the app switcher can look nice but depending on what's underneath it can look quite off at times when some objects underneath gets ”light scattered” by the glass. Here is the red ”current time” bar from Google Calendar that look like two blurry lines under the app switcher in this example:

And here is the app switcher again over a bright background – not so easy to read the text under the apps when they are also white:

Now one would think that changing the new Liquid Glass option to ”Tinted” should affect the tint of the glassy app switcher background, but it doesn't – it stays the same.

Now, what you can do is go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Displays and enable Reduce transparency, but that makes things very opaque which takes me to an example with the opaque app switcher (i.e. Reduce transparency = on) showing another problem I don't remember seeing in previous macOS versions.

If you open many enough apps so the app switcher start to touch the edges of your screen and then keep opening apps, the text under the leftmost and rightmost app gets misaligned. The longer the name of the app the more misaligned the text gets:

 

[marte91]

Tahoe is by far the worst macos since Lion and Big Sur lol

Complete trashfire in the OS dept at apple, like its to the point that the new mac hardware isnt appealing because it doesnt let you use an OS released before it

And if a new OS is unveiled tomorrow will it be the worst right?

 

[johnsawyercjs]

This Liquid Glass issue still hasn't been fixed, in Tahoe's System Settings app--what's the purpose of having a translucent Search field, under which scrolling text slides and gets in the way of seeing what you're typing into the Search field? Not even Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast fix this:

 

[Madonepro]

I don't know if anyone at Apple will read this but my good please fix Safari. Since Tahoe it every day will freeze up trying to load two websites at once. I constantly have to force quit and then reopen and it loads. It seems to happen often when YouTube, chess.com are open especially if I have a YouTube webpage in the dock. Please try to repo this it's an awful experience and never happened before Tahoe.

No one from Apple will 'read' your comment. If you really want to communicate this, search in spotlight for feedback assistant, log in, and make a report.

 

[steve333]

Tahoe is awful all around.
Facebook once again doing things that were fixed with the last OS.
Website tabs when I go back to them after awhile show a blank page even when I refresh it.
Harder to read, to the point that I had to mess around for a long time with my monitor and OS settings just to make it readable but still worse than before.
Apple's reason for being was to make computing simpler. Tim Cook needs to take a hike.

 

[steve333]

No one from Apple will 'read' your comment. If you really want to communicate this, search in spotlight for feedback assistant, log in, and make a report.

I don't think they read that either

 

[steve333]

First time I haven’t upgraded Mac OS by the .1 update. All the comments are still holding me back - is it really that bad?!

It's worse. Tahoe is a disgrace to the legacy of Steve Jobs. Not hyperbole, the truth

 

[skiguy45]

Agreed. It's been awesome on my Mac Studio M2 Max and MacBook Air M3.

I love how people think it's Apple's fault and everyone is experiencing things that is unique to them. As if posting in Apple Forums will get them to go, "Oh, so and so told us to fix Safari, we'd better get on that." Love it.

Allan Dye got pushed out when I complained about Liquid Glass on here 🤣

 

[ZipZilla]

This is the first iOS/Mac OS where I am just waiting until some new feature or function comes out that I would actually benefit from (Siri improvements, RCS 3.0, etc.)

 

[MrNomNoms]

Safari 26.2 repeatedly freezes on pages left alone for several hours. Its retain/release structure has been modified and let's hope not with Swift and they keep it Cocoa/AppKit. The fact Swift is over fifteen years old and considered a work in progress would leave me to designate it as a research language. Roll back features into ObjC 3.0 and keep working on both languages. Most of Safari is C++ just as much of Pro Apps are C/C++ with ObjC/ObjC++.

Here is the change log for Safari 26.3: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes/safari-26_3-release-notes

I don't see the issue you've raised as being addressed but then again given that it is over the Christmas break they maybe focusing on the essentials with 26.4 being the place where bigger bug fixes are addressed (based on the rumoured features that'll be included). If it is any consolation, I've noticed the same sort of freezing behaviour on tvOS when using the YouTube app (which makes used of Webkit) and the tvOS user interface freezing - the responsiveness has gone backwards when compared to tvOS 18.x series. I guess it'll be a situation of 'wait and see' but I hope it isn't a matter of having to wait for the rumoured 'snow leopard' release that apparently version 27 will be.

 

[klm9210]

No issues here, happy camper

 

[mac-rumorist]

In all honestly I have not noticed any major bugs, other than the Finger Finder window redesign (stealing 20px of realestate) and the transparency, which ends up showing blurred out text, multiple corner radii - my daily visual UX in Finder is a significantly annoying messy result of 'features'. I just hope someone comes to their UI design senses one day...

 

[mac-rumorist]

This Liquid Glass issue still hasn't been fixed, in Tahoe's System Settings app--what's the purpose of having a translucent Search field, under which scrolling text slides and gets in the way of seeing what you're typing into the Search field? Not even Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast fix this:
View attachment 2588848

Totally agree with you, another example:

 

[ivan86]

First time I haven’t upgraded Mac OS by the .1 update. All the comments are still holding me back - is it really that bad?!

Apparently some are fine without Launchpad. Not me.

I am staying on Sequoia for a while with 373 applications / tools / utilities in apps folder which are perfectly organised on a single screen in Launchpad in various folders.

 

[star-affinity]

One thing that is annoying (but luckily doesn't happen often) is that a click of a window on the background doesn't make it come to the front on the first click. Every time it happens I'm thinking: ”hmm…… didn't I click?”

But it happened many times enough that I'm quite certain it's not me imagining things.

This a rather bad flaw in an OS so I hope it will get fixed even if it's very difficult to reproduce. I've sent feedback to Apple.

Worth mentioning that I do have a few third party apps that could be interfering, but it is definitely new for Tahoe.

 

[Adora]

One thing that is annoying (but luckily doesn't happen often) is that a click of a window on the background doesn't make it come to the front on the first click. Every time it happens I'm thinking: ”hmm…… didn't I click?”

But it happened many times enough that I'm quite certain it's not me imagining things.

This a rather bad flaw in an OS so I hope it will get fixed even if it's very difficult to reproduce. I've sent feedback to Apple.

Worth mentioning that I do have a few third party apps that could be interfering, but it is definitely new for Tahoe.

I recognized this too and turned off showing the Desktop by clicking on it completely. I don't know when it started. But it was already there before I updated to 26.3.

 

[kingjames1970]

Did the upgrade but man, I suppose I’ll get used to it but those rounded corners are too rounded, feels like my windows are much smaller. And the interface just feels less cohesive, hard to put my finger on it all.

 

[jonnysods]

They still haven't fixed the constant CPU drain and fan noise and fairly routine tasks.

I understand that Liquid Glass uses a lot more resources (which is a total waste for no UX improvement) but I'm talking about things like running Time Machine, or simply selecting a large number of files to delete. What the heck is causing the huge drain and fan noise? This used to run with no effort and now it's like I'm running a large language model locally.

This has to be some poor programming.

And something changed in Time Machine because it used to show a small number of file changes if you run a subsequent update shortly after, and now, even if you run 5 minutes later, it shows more than 100 to 200 thousand file changes!?!

I’ve been seeing that in Time Machine for a while, I keep thinking to myself what the heck is going on on my Mac for it to pick up so many changes in a couple of days?

 

[Adora]

Did the upgrade but man, I suppose I’ll get used to it but those rounded corners are too rounded, feels like my windows are much smaller. And the interface just feels less cohesive, hard to put my finger on it all.

It's even annoying me on my 49" display. Must be much more annoying on MacBooks.

 

[tomtad]

This Liquid Glass issue still hasn't been fixed, in Tahoe's System Settings app--what's the purpose of having a translucent Search field, under which scrolling text slides and gets in the way of seeing what you're typing into the Search field? Not even Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast fix this:
View attachment 2588848

It's mirrored from iOS. On your phone go to Settings and look at the search bar at the bottom, the content scrolls behind it. Same in Safari with the search bar. So far makes sense.

The difference is in MacOS however is the side bar is supposedly a liquid glass element, and you can't have glass on glass, so the search bar doesn't have the required glassy-ness to clearly seperate it from the content behind. So you end up with the mess above.

Solution is to do the fade below the bar and leave nothing behind. Just one of those areas where the UI hasn't been quite thought through.

 

[Foxmulder17]

Not for me - been rock solid.

Same here. I don’t understand how so many are having issues. I run the latest version of Logic Pro with tons of plugins (some not even approved for Tahoe) and the thing doesn’t even blink. Completely rock solid.

 

[Adora]

Same here. I don’t understand how so many are having issues. I run the latest version of Logic Pro with tons of plugins (some not even approved for Tahoe) and the thing doesn’t even blink. Completely rock solid.

I don't have problems with any app not being stable. But there are constantly background tasks taking too much resources when I am doing almost nothing, like writing here or listening to an offline audio book before sleeping. My 64GB RAM M4 Pro mini is getting hot and I hear the fan.

I maybe wouldn't recognize this if I use the Mac only for CPU/GPU/RAM intensive stuff most of the day, every day.

 

[Mac-key]

First time I haven’t upgraded Mac OS by the .1 update. All the comments are still holding me back - is it really that bad?!

All the hate made me worried as well, but I finally upgraded last week when .2 dropped and it's fine! For me, it's been a seamless transition.

 

[SilentSpecter]

I downgraded back to Sequoia for the time being. I just couldn't stand the ugliness, slop and overall all the breaks in user flows that were put into this version. Apple killed the experience that once was macOS. Tahoe feels cheap and kitschy. Very disappointed.

 

[Adora]

I downgraded back to Sequoia for the time being. I just couldn't stand the ugliness, slop and overall all the breaks in user flows that were put into this version. Apple killed the experience that once was macOS. Tahoe feels cheap and kitschy. Very disappointed.

As soon as my concentration is a little better I'll downgrade too. I planned this already months ago. At least Liquid Glass seems to be gone for almost everything but it's still very very ugly and buggy.