Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars
macOS Golden Gate also has design changes. For example, apps now have a unified toolbar at the top, and the sidebar now expands to the edge of the window.
Sidebar behavior is also being updated. Sidebars will now expand to the full edge of the window, with refraction effects continuing beneath them rather than cutting off at the sidebar boundary. Sidebar icons will also retain their color, a change that addresses a common complaint about the original Liquid Glass implementation.
I’m really happy for these changes, but it’s not clear to me that they’re improvements over what we had pre-Tahoe or, especially, pre-Big Sur.
Oh thank god! No more margins around sidebars on macOS!
sidebars now work how they used to!
I just love that toolbars have clear/strict dividers again in #macOS27.
Whoever said your content and UI should blend is a liar.
What a wonderful and welcome fix in #macOS27.
Instead of properly fixing the Liquid Glass implementation of
NSToolbarbuttons in macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple decided to simply place an ugly, semi-transparent macOS 15-ish background bar behind the buttons, which makes Liquid Glass completely useless in the toolbar.
macOS 26 should have never been more than one developer seed release, with these changes taking place before the actual public release.
It’s sad that we had to endure this crap of a UI for a full year and now have to maintain apps for it for I don’t know how much longer.
Previously:
Why has nobody told me this before?
defaults write -g NSSplitViewItemSidebarDefaultsToFloatingAppearance -bool NOLook at this gorgeously clean sidebar on macOS Tahoe!
The macOS standard sidebars don’t live in a blob with very uncomfortable margins (which were required for there to be a layer fit in between the “traffic light” window controls and the window’s edge).
No more progressive blur for scroll edges in System Settings on macOS. This is definitely a very welcome change and overall one of the many little enhancements -- driving the entire UI in the right direction. Love it.
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Agreed that most of these probably aren't improvements over what we had before (especially pre-Big Sur). That design was much better. This one is better than Tahoe, but only because Tahoe was the worst design MacOS has ever had
There are some things I like about the design, like I'm glad we're moving away from extreme flatness with very low contrast
I'm always going to miss the centered title bar text (until they bring it back). It just looks better
"Apple decided to simply place an ugly, semi-transparent macOS 15-ish background bar behind the buttons, which makes Liquid Glass completely useless in the toolbar."
That's good, though.
"I’m really happy for these changes, but it’s not clear to me that they’re improvements over what we had pre-Tahoe or, especially, pre-Big Sur."
We went from the worst-designed Mac OS ever to the second-worst, which still isn't great, but at least it's not getting even worse, which was a real possibility.
What is the point of so much transparency with blurry content beneath the controls, toolbars, sidebars, etc? It does nothing for usability. Didn't Apple mock Windows Vista over this?
@Ben G
> Didn't Apple mock Windows Vista over this?
And then they grew so big, so fast, they probably ended up hiring a lot of the people responsible for Vista.
If only the Music app had a proper toolbar again instead of that monstrous floating blob covering the bottom few songs (with a horizontal scroll bar above it, for reasons unknown).
