macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 8
Apple today provided developers with the eighth beta of macOS Tahoe 26 for testing purposes, with the update coming a week after the seventh beta.
The release notes don’t call out any changes since beta 5.
Previously:
Update (2025-08-26): Mario Guzmán:
How is this good design? It is so busy. Way too much clashing. Blobs of low contrast. JFC… why?!
They were so concerned with if they could pull off liquid glass that they didn’t stop to think if they should or shouldn’t DO liquid glass globally.
😵💫
I hate using my Mac now.
The new macOS Tahoe seed has new ‘order front’ and ‘order out’ animations for windows, including some physics springs and a little bit of bounce. It’s not as dramatic as on mobile, but it’s a lot more like iOS than before. I hope they go further, though.
I’m also hearing that the MEDecodedMessageBanner API for Mail extensions is broken,
Update (2025-09-02): Tuomas Hämäläinen:
Apple love to preach “the UI gets out of the way of your content” with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let’s compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I’ve added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
Just installed dev 8 on Mac. If the suggestions are true and this is the final design, it’s still shit. The window corners are ludicrous. The massive drop shadows make window buttons in eg Finder the most visually prominent thing in view. All these elements (incl the sidebar) sit ABOVE your content, rather than being deferential to it, thereby becoming a visual distraction.
Oddly, Reduce Transparency now knocks out most of the shadows. The result isn’t pretty or coherent but it’s more usable.
I just don’t get this design. At all. The eye is distracted by the drop shadows, which lift the sidebar and buttons ‘above’ the content (ie the icons) and the title of the window. From a visual hierarchy standpoint, it makes no sense.
The menu bar also just feels weird without a background.
I saw @stroughtonsmith mention that Beta 8 typically is the last beta before the RCs… okay but wait, Beta 7 completely broke my toolbar. The toolbar where my code hasn’t changed since like -- 2018… And worked in Tahoe Betas 1-6 just fine. lol broken in Betas 7-8.
[…]
And I am not blaming engineering. I am blaming this full-height sidebar design and Liquid Glass that creates all these crazy edge cases in apps.
No one ever asked for full-height sidebars where we have to the split toolbars into sections and create movement along with the width of said split view panels… no one asked for invisible toolbars either… so many little issues that need to be addressed because the design is fundamentally complex and broken.
Is there a single person at Apple who thinks: “Hey, this looks cool, let’s keep it that way”?
Okay, someone pointed out to me the #macOSTahoe controls window I posted yesterday was Beta 1.
I went ahead and recreated it myself with additional controls using Beta 8.
I will point out a few things I DO LOVE…
1. The text field actually looks nicer. Sequoia and older had sharp corners & the bottom edge was darker.
2. The Search field FINALLY has rounded ends again! Like in Mac OS X Tiger! Little visual cues like this go a long way!
What have they done to my boi in macOS Tahoe!?
I just realized that Mac always had centered window titles since the original Macintosh and Alan Dye just came in and changed all of that out of nowhere.
Look how they massacred my boy…
No more creative edges; macOS Tahoe forces all icons to stay trapped within the squircle.
The state of Mail in macOS Tahoe.
A while back, I reported feedback for FaceTime on macOS because the Settings window was so long and not resizable, some controls would be behind the Dock and were inaccessible.
I finally got a reply that it should be addressed now in #macOSTahoe… This was their solution.
Did Apple forget their own HIG for macOS app layouts? You might be saying, “but it is Catalyst.” So. And? They make this technology, it should be perfect.
This makes me so sad; this is why you need a proper HIG.
Checkbox labels should succinct (short, to the point). If you need a description, it goes as a secondary label under it and aligned with the checkbox’s title.
What you DO NOT DO is put the checkbox title to the left of the checkbox and the whole ass description to the right.
Trying to figure out how they got some right and some just super wrong in the FaceTime app Settings window… The left side is for section titles only.
The dynamic background adaptation is broken. Buttons shift from black to white as the background changes, and it’s jarring every single time. Toolbar consistency is all over the place too. Photos and Mail use progressive blur with gradients while Safari keeps the old blurred rectangle, with no apparent logic to which apps get which treatment. Scrolling through Photos is particularly painful as the interface flips from black to white and back again as you move through your library. This isn’t a minor polish issue. It’s a fundamental problem with how the adaptive system responds to content, and Apple should fix it.
When the general public gets their hands on Liquid Glass, I’m sure people will complaint. The current state is too buggy to survive contact with millions of users. I expect iterative improvements throughout the OS 26 cycle as the design gets tweaked based on user feedback.
the new icon for http://notepadexe.com embodies the macOS26 shape. it had to happen. but I'm not parting with the original icon. now it's available as an alternative dock icon 🖼️ - maybe add more in the future.
I don’t know, but I feel like this grey artwork on the zip file icon makes it look like the file is not available yet, like when copying or something.
It’s weird you have to hold down option (⌥) to edit widgets in Notification Center, but command (⌘) in Control Center to edit control widgets on macOS 26 “Tahoe”.
Previously:
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The “do you know what a beta is? They’ll fix that before release” crowd getting softer each day.
@billyok I don't think anyone knows what a beta is anymore. The word has been abused beyond all meaning.
One thing it definitely does not mean is that they'll fix it on release. Release is just extended public beta until end of year or so, the last many years.
@billyok Everyone who was saying "They'll fix it before release" was being at best totally naïve or more likely willfully ignorant and flagrantly ignoring the pattern of behavior from Apple over the last decade.
If people don't mind me asking a semi-related question in this thread, since these blog posts are one of the few good spaces on the internet to interact with Apple devs and other pros:
I found a bug in the Accessibility API that started in macOS 15 that can cause the entire UI of an app to lock up. I don't think there's any way to work around it. I could probably create a minimal example reproducing the bug.
Is it actually worth submitting it to Apple?
As far as I can tell, bug reports still go into a black hole. And making the report and the example reproducing the bug will take up hours of my time better spent doing other work. And even if Apple *does* respond to the bug report, it'll probably only be applied to a much later version of macOS, and all the current versions of macOS will continue to have this bug. It just doesn't seem like it's worth my time... but at the same time, it's a pretty heinous bug that could affect my users!
@Bri I submitted a macOS SwiftUI crasher (related to the text selection API) about 8 months ago which was finally fixed in macOS 26 beta 6 but I don't expect a fix for 15.x. So, more or less as you said.
Then I read crap like this: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html
and it reminds me why I want nothing to do with Apple's Feedback Assistant. Why go through the effort when they're hardly even trying?
Even better news: I found a workaround! Boy is it hacky, but it works. Time much better spent than sending a probably pointless bug report to Apple.
