Golden Gate Liquid Glass
The Golden Gate update to Liquid Glass solves a fair number of the most common criticisms through both design changes and customizable settings. It doesn’t fix everything, and the changes are primarily iterative—if your quarrel is with the overall design direction, this update won’t help you.
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The net effect of all of Golden Gate’s design changes isn’t huge, and Golden Gate still looks more like Tahoe than like any previous version of macOS. Some controversial decisions remain in effect, like putting any non-squircle icons into “squircle jail” so they can think about what they’ve done.
[…]
But based on reactions I’ve seen during the betas, I expect these tweaks will be just enough to quell the loudest complaints, at least for people who were using Liquid Glass as an excuse not to upgrade.
It’s better than before but doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Every time I do testing on a pre–Big Sur Mac (or even on Sequoia) I get sad about what we’ve lost.
The most obvious improvement in Liquid Glass from Tahoe is the change from a choice between Clear or Tinted to a replacement slider. This also features one of the new Easter Eggs, a beautifully rendered image of Clarus the Dogcow.
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Quite why Apple has pushed this decision so far forward I don’t understand, though. As with the previous options, for this slider to work, Accessibility settings like Reduce transparency must be turned off, on the basis that you can’t have too much of a good thing.
Nature is healing
I do appreciate some of the fixes in macOS 27. But this work ain’t done yet. What is even happening in this inspector[…]
macos 27 system settings graphical bug
Everyone is going to pretend that Liquid Glass is fine now, “nature is healing”, and such total bullshit.
The Overton NSWindow had shifted so far that nobody even knows what’s good and bad anymore.
I skipped macOS 26 entirely out of utter contempt for the criminally bad UI. I’ve lived on macOS 27 since the first Developer Beta. It’s in great shape, the most mature x.0 in many years (unsurprisingly considering they began its development two months earlier than usual).
The widget only appears only when hovering over a certain area, and the only item in its popup menu is Show App in Finder…
Opened the new version of Mail in the just ‘upgraded’ Golden Gate and immediately went searching for a fix! Included is what the Mailboxes Sidebar looks like in my few months old iMac.
I know they did it purposefully to add more contrast to selected items, but I don’t really like the changing font to bold on Golden Gate sidebars. It changes the text size which looks awkward, particularly when it has to truncate.
Even with Apple’s OS 27 release, Liquid Glass is the software equivalent of super gluing tacky gold gewgaws all over the place.
I don’t think Apple did enough testing on Notes in Golden Gate, those group and sort options are empty?
Oh, what fresh hell of indistinguishable came this new preview app icon’s choice?
They totally fixed Liquid Glass on Golden Gate.
And, yes, liquid glass is still there. I don’t care about how many sliders they put in, every time I see that I am reminded that if they needed to add it, they blew it.
Previously:
- macOS 27 Golden Gate
- Golden Gate Squircle Jail
- Liquid Glass 27 Slider
- Liquid Glass 27 Icons
- Golden Gate Window Corners
- Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars
- Golden Gate Menu Icons
Update (2026-09-23): Kevin C:
I had the run the betas in a VM, and thought the UI was a great improvement over Tahoe. However, it left me unprepared for the new bright edge highlights around buttons and input fields, etc. on HDR displays when actually updating my MacBook. I was glad I could fiddle around with BetterDisplay and disable XDR settings, which removed them. But I would prefer that an accessibility setting like Reduce Bright Effects considered them to be bright enough to reduce.
Update (2026-09-28): Jeff Johnson:
First, on Sequoia the background of the status bar is gray, distinguishing it and the link URL from the web page content it covers, whereas on Tahoe and Golden Gate the background of the status bar appears to be the same color as the web page.
[…]
The second difference between Sequoia and Liquid Glassy versions is that the Safari status bar appears higher on the page with Liquid Glass, presumably due to the exaggerated window corner radius. Thus, going back to the screenshots of my blog post, Liquid Glass can make the status bar text appear almost as if it were part of the web page text. Notice if that if the scroll position is just right, the status bar text fits vertically between two paragraphs, a situation that I could not reproduce on Sequoia, because the status bar text is closer to the bottom of the Safari window.
Why does my Apple Music sidebar keep doing this!? It is like the top blur-fade mask will extend to the bottom of the sidebar… I have to then quit the app every time…
Update (2026-10-05): Pierre Igot:
In macOS Golden Gate, when you enable the option to “Increase contrast”, the contrast between the button text label and the button background in standard macOS buttons actually… decreases, since the text label stays black and the background gray gets darker.
Update (2026-10-09): Nico Reese (Mastodon):
macOS does adopt some of Liquid Glass’s physical behavior this year, including subtle click animations and springy, bouncy interactions. One major piece is still missing, though: the fluid morphing between button shapes and interface elements that gives iOS much of its distinctive character.
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Overall, Apple’s 2027 design updates are a mixed bag. macOS benefits enormously from the refinements to Liquid Glass and now delivers the most convincing implementation of the material across Apple’s platforms. watchOS also moves in the right direction, while iOS and iPadOS surprisingly lose much of the depth that made Liquid Glass feel truly physical. tvOS and visionOS, meanwhile, remain strangely inconsistent with the rest of Apple’s ecosystem.
Preferences aside, you can clearly see on both platforms that dark mode looks much richer. Light mode can only show the cool new lighting effects on an HDR display, because they’re on a 100% white background. They can’t get any brighter unless you have an HDR screen that can go to eleven. There’s just a hint of gray shading to suggest depth.
We had a solution to this in Aqua, starting with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Toolbars and titlebars were gray, not pure white. It’s true that nothing can be higher contrast than white on black, but literally anything has more contrast than white on white.
Although Liquid Glass has been around for one year, the compatibility issues it introduced haven’t completely disappeared. Drawing on a real-world project, SLIT_STUDIO developer Megabits summarizes several common UIKit adaptation pitfalls and the solutions he used to address them.
For most of the past week, I tried living with the default mid-point on the slider. I gave up almost immediately on macOS and iPadOS. I lasted much longer on iOS, but I found the glass to have an unpleasant milky hue. Now I’m back to full tinted, mostly because it’s the only way I can stand looking at notifications.
With the previous version of “tinted”, especially in dark mode, there was a nice amount of contrast. The material looked glassy and translucent, but it was pleasantly dark. In the 27 OSs, the tinted mode looks dull, matte, and significantly lighter. The worst part: it still uses white text, leading to universally worse contrast. So now I get worse readability and effectively none of the refractive effects. That sucks!
First up, let’s talk tab bars. I think these looked awful in the original Liquid Glass redesign, and in 27.0 they look even worse. Below is an example of three tab bars from Safari in macOS.
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In macOS 26’s dark mode, I had no problem with system menus even when Liquid Glass was set to clear. In macOS 27, even in the fully tinted mode, the menus have much lower contrast.
Golden Gate UI is miles better than what Tahoe brought us but at the same time, that’s not saying much because Tahoe set the bar so low…
31 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
> Every time I do testing on a pre–Big Sur Mac (or even on Sequoia) I get sad about what we’ve lost.
I get this the most when I boot up a system running OS X 10.5 - 10.9 or earlier. God I miss that UI. It was the best we ever had.
"I get this the most when I boot up a system running OS X 10.5 - 10.9 or earlier. God I miss that UI. It was the best we ever had."
Hey, we already got BackToCatalina. Maybe someone more adventurous out there can try port over the Mavericks UI too!
> Overton NSWindow
Thank you, Jeff.
And now I await a version of UTM that supports Apple's new USB passthrough support in virtualization.framework, which they obviously built just for *me* so I could use my Braille display under Linux. Which, yes, is a non-negotiable workflow for me, and God help us if they ever get around to fixing the regression in Tahoe that crashes Fusion while VoiceOver is running because that would indicate a clear intent by Apple to sabotage my Intel hardware which can't run GG.
Older macOS releases were built to be the best Desktop OS.
Modern macOS is built as an accessory to iOS, where its changes follow iOS even if they're worse for a Desktop OS:
* Liquid Ass
* Careless Catalyst crap
* SwiftUI slop
* Shortcuts when Automator and Applescript exist
* Stage Manager when Exposé exists
* APFS (a gimped file system built for phones instead of a Desktop)
Soon, we'll lose decades of specifically-designed mouse and selection behaviors because basic-bitch touchscreen behaviors matter more. Apple's gotta match the expectations of their Simple Jack iOS "power users".
I've played with GG in a UTM VM for the heck of it. For the GG curious: it's a little better than Tahoe just a little bit. It's still significantly worse than anything that came before. As with Tahoe's Liquid Ass, every single change made since Sequoia is uglier, stupider, dumber, and full of the hideous. Every single UI change is for the worse. Pick a change and get your answer. Toggle switches, a weird oval shape - hideous. Glasshole effects on various controls - stupid and ugly. Icons sprinkled around various menus - dumba$$ and horrible. Corner radius that no longer matches the radius of the new super rounded dumb pill controls - fn idiotic.
The regression of the Mac UI is so discouraging. There's been a "ratcheting" effect where steps backward are somewhat mitigated, but the overall trend is very bad.
Here's a fun (/s) GG interface bug I saw on Reddit yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1wjkrdp/new_oswide_minigame_just_in_case_anyone_cares/
I find it interesting that with Tahoe one could be under the impression that although the choices were bad, at least there was some thought behind it. The Golden Gate UI bugs give the impression of a company that has just given up trying. Very sad to see indeed.
I will eventually upgrade my M3 MacBook Air to Golden Gate, albeit with great reluctance, but not today. Following some of the links from this post confirmed that I'm probably best waiting for 27.2 at least.
My mother's 2021 iMac, which is currently still on Sequoia, will be more of a challenge as there's still a fair bit of Intel-only stuff on there brought over from her previous 2014 iMac after that kicked the bucket. (Yay for Time Machine backups, didn't lose any of her documents or photos.) I didn't want to inflict Liquid Glass on her, she already has the resolution reduced for better readability and I dread to think how the UI changes are going to impact her. 🙁
Oh, and will be turning off a LOT of 'features' on both machines, and making sure they stay off. Looking at you, Apple 'Intelligence' and Siri.
The only positive point I've seen so far with Golden Gate is that the terrible Tahoe Day wallpaper will not appear anymore as the default one.
There are some improvements to Golden Gate gestures in 27.2 beta. They really broke AppKit with the transition to NSGestureRecognizer, and seems like they are slowly fixing stuff. What a useless effort.
I'm afraid Tahoe was the last straw for me. My trust in Apple's direction for macOS has been diminishing for years, but with Liquid Glass and the dropping of support for my Intel MacBook Pro, the time came for me to move forward and migrate to a different platform. I've always preferred making desktop apps, and I'll always have fond memories of the previous eras of OS X. It was so much fun! Liquid Glass, the challenges of SwiftUI, the lack of documentation, and changes in Apple such as becoming a services-oriented company and displaying ads in more places, are all anti-fun. The company and the platform are becoming unrecognizable to me. This ain't what I signed up for!
@Preston What platform did you move to? Windows is just as big of a mess, if not bigger. The main Linux UI frameworks lacks consistency or unified direction. When Windows 8 was released, I always used to joke that macOS was a better Windows than Windows. But now they are all in the gutter tbh.
> As with Tahoe's Liquid Ass, every single change made since Sequoia is uglier, stupider, dumber, and full of the hideous. Every single UI change is for the worse.
I'd change that to every change made since Big Sur. And Big Sur to me was a worse UI regression than Tahoe.
But really it truly started going wrong with OS X 10.10.
@Léo: I find GNOME to be really usable, with less clutter and interface noise than OS X. Added bonus is they offer an expose like feature, which has become absolute muscle memory to me in the last 20(?) years
From a desktop UI perspective, the only thing I miss from the Mac when I use modern GNOME is the global menu. It's stupid to have this bar at the top of the screen that mostly does nothing. Everything else is a huge upgrade, from window management to the visual design to the sheer speed of everything to extensibility... For the first time in probably a decade, using a computer just feels good again.
It feels like I actually own my own computer.
Wasn’t there a Gnome extension that moved menu bars from windows into the top one, similar to macOS? I remember it came with Ubuntu by default, but could be installed on any distro. I could be misremembering some or all of the details above.
@Plume Although Electron has moved some apps to the lowest common denominator, I still miss quite a lot of high-quality apps on the Linux desktop, like Preview, Affinity Suite, Homerow, great Calendar/Contacts with good sync, etc.
@Léo: There used to be a GNOME extension like that, but it's no longer maintained and doesn't work right in newer GNOME versions.
@Daniël: True, but as software quality on the Mac deteriorates and on Linux improves, the gap is closing rapidly. Also, for something as simple as Preview, it's easy enough to tell an LLM to make a .deb version. Just point out what exact features you like, and you'll get what you need.
Windows is terrible, yes, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
*BUT* it can be hammered more-or-less into a desired and usable shape. Not so for macOS.
And if you start with an Enterprise IoT LTSC version, you can dispense with most of the consumer experience shite, and the artificial hardware limitations to boot; even your Intel Mac can breathe a little longer with a supported release of Windows. This should be a source of shame to Apple, but isn't, because Apple's obsolescence has never primarily been about deprecation of old code, whatever its apologists claim.
It looks like the code to re-enable the floating sidebar in Tahoe was disabled in Golden Gate from Beta 4 onwards. Good riddance!
Probably the funniest part of the whole "floating sidebar" saga was seeing the people behind Apple Music's website having to implement that thing in HTML and CSS... until this past week, when it was unceremoniously yanked out and replaced with a Golden Gate-style sidebar instead. To be honest looking back now I'm impressed they were able to match that look in-browser, and cleanly implement it in a way that Internet Archive was able to save it. Actually it's funny they only used it from early May until this past Monday... that's only 4 months! Apple Podcasts' website still has the Tahoe-style sidebar for now, though, if you want to see it.
Honestly I'm mostly pleased with Golden Gate's sidebar after they removed the silly floating aspect. I'm even starting to warm up to seeing horizontal content visually sliding under the sidebar, as if it's a dam holding the content back but through specific sluices you can see it flow underneath (speaking of a term Apple loves using lately!).
Unfortunately though screen space is still largely wasted with the new Mac UI. I really hope Apple relearns the art of managing limited screen estate again (especially vertically), even with the new touchscreen MacBook apparently on the horizon. (And for that matter, the art of contrast and color balance, anything other than SEARING WHITE!)
@Gord L. I absolutely admire that person's dedication to maintaining Mavericks (the last well-kept Mac OS to date IMO), but my question was more about the possibility of porting its UI forward like the Catalina project I linked earlier.
I am using that Windows. My issue with Windows is much more profound, especially from a UI standpoint. The 3774 different context menu designs, the 2884 different dialog designs, the lack of any consistency even within system software. Yes, in recent years macOS has some of that too, but it is far worse on Windows. Windows 7 was the peak of Windows design, and it has been going downhill for a decade and a half. Satya Nasloppa has ruined Windows and Office.
I am honestly tempted to see if I could run Mavericks in the modern day using the stuff from mavericksforever.com. It's probably more trouble than it's worth, but it's really tempting...
Re: Mac-style menu bar at the top of the screen on Linux
KDE (and SonicDE, for when they eventually ruin KDE) has a Global Menu panel widget. If you add a panel to the top of your screen and place that widget in it—bam, programs will all place their menus there, just like on the Mac. I’ve used it for years.
> *BUT* it can be hammered more-or-less into a desired and usable shape.
That's how I run Windows, and it can be a good experience. The problem is that, just like Apple, Microsoft is increasingly focused on making it a worse experience with every new release. It's a solution for now, but I want a solution for the next twenty years, and right now, that can only be Linux.
> KDE (and SonicDE, for when they eventually ruin KDE) has a Global Menu panel widget
Thanks, I didn't know that! I gave it a shot, but it has the same issue GNOME's version had. KDE's own apps support it pretty well, but something like Firefox just leaves the menubar empty. I'll leave it enabled on my KDE boxes just to see which apps I use regularly are affected. If there aren't too many, I can fork them, but it might be too much work.
I wish somebody gave 10 million to a project that actually focuses on stuff like that instead of vibecoding some dotfiles.
Jobs on Aqua “... it's liquid, one of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it”. It was progressively phased out and for good reasons. I have Aqua 2 on iPhone and iPad. My Mac is on High Sierra. Much better design.
Only someone actively sabotaging the macOS team is willing to push an interface useable on 6 inches multi touch display to post selfies on social media. But already showing its limits, and let’s say it lack of comprehension, on 10 inches and beyond. Driving a Mac Studio on that design is an affront to past grandeur. Eventually running it with converged iPadOS is also just another demonstration of internal power play.
For the first time in two decades I am considering alternatives.
> Windows 7 was the peak of Windows design
Win2000 too, in a way.
I'm daily-driving Fedora with GNOME now. Mint with Cinnamon on a second machine. Both are okay. Not great, not terrible. Definitely better than Windows. Especially when I don't have to fight the machine to do (or better yet, to not to do) something.
I'm not dependant on any proprietary software though.
@Léo I'm using my existing Windows PC alongside a Linux desktop. It may be a mess as well, but I'm familiar with Windows just as I am with macOS, and software developers aren't dropping support for my computer. I must say that the recent Windows 11 performance update noticeably improved performance on my PC, and using FL ASIO for music production, I'm not getting the infamous crackling that CoreAudio occasionally outputs out under memory pressure. It's actually been a pretty positive experience so far.
LOL, instead you have Microslop using coslopilot to write security patches, coslopilot to review security patches and break the world.
https://x.com/ICS_SCADA/status/2102005914836275561?s=20
It’s really embarrassing. Microsoft used to be rock solid. Satya Nasloppa ruined Microslop.
