macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 3

Juli Clover (Mr. Macintosh, 9to5Mac):

Right now, there is a bit of a bug with the beta that is preventing Apple silicon Macs from being able to download it. Intel Macs can be updated with no issue, but Apple will need to address the server side bug before it will be available to everyone.

I can confirm that, once again, Software Update isn’t working. But you can download the full installer manually.

Again, the release notes don’t seem to say what’s new.

Howard Oakley:

Apple’s operating systems provide support for encryption and related techniques in CryptoKit, making quantum-secure methods available to third-party apps as well. For OS 26, CryptoKit gains Module-Lattice based key encapsulation or ML-KEM, part of the FIPS 203 primary standard for general encryption. Signatures gain the Module-Lattice based digital signature algorithm or ML-DSA, part of FIPS 204.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I’m very ready for a beta 3 of the new OSes; beta 2 has been mostly usable, but has lots of little blockers getting in the way of progressing my apps

Previously:

• Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass
• macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 2
• macOS Tahoe 26 Announced

Update (2025-07-07): The full installer didn’t work for me, either. After a long time, it reported an error failing to prepare the update.

Update (2025-07-08): The same installer worked this morning.

Mr. Macintosh:

This is the new macOS Tahoe Installer

Mario Guzmán:

After installing #macOSTahoe b3, I got a new wallpaper! :)

[…]

I think these icons are also new/updated in #macOSTahoe b3…

Mr. Macintosh:

Apple has added the new Tahoe wallpaper via image and active video .heic for both the blue background and beach background wallpaper images.

Marcus Mendes:

Much like on tvOS, Apple recently introduced native video screen savers on macOS that transition smoothly into the wallpaper upon unlocking.

With today’s beta seed, Apple included a new “Tahoe Day” screen saver that glides across the surface of Lake Tahoe’s rocky shoreline, with snow-capped mountains in the background.

This is pretty nice, but I had to turn it off on my Tahoe Mac because I mostly control it via Screen Sharing, and this makes it really slow.

Marcus Mendes:

One of the most common complaints in macOS Tahoe 26 betas 1 and 2 was the new tab UI in apps like Safari and Terminal, which added a black bar to the bottom of inactive tabs.

[…]

Now, Apple has increased contrast and eliminated the black bar, making it much easier to spot the active tab at a glance.

Mario Guzmán:

Native Tabs in #macOSTahoe still suck but at least they have fixed a lot of the visual issues from beta 1 and 2.

Thomas Brand:

Since the earliest rumors of transparent UI, I thought Tahoe would adopt the “frosted” look of visionOS.

With the release of Tahoe beta 3 I could be convinced frosted was Apple’s plan all along, and the initial renders of liquid glass were merely a faint to get an extreme reaction.

Craig Grannell:

Someone – probably multiple people – at Apple signed this off. The ‘glass’. The lack of clarity. The absurd floating back/forward buttons that become the most visually prominent thing in the window. All of it.

Reduce Transparency makes things slightly less awful but it still weird and ugly. Best bet appears to be Reduce Transparency + a solid colour (ideally grey) for wallpaper.

(This is dev beta 3.)

We’re, what, about eight weeks and counting now?

Jonathan Wight:

So i guess now that we’re at b3 the blurry icons are here to stay…

Now we can all experience what it is to have old person eyes.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

It’s beta 3 of macOS and Apple still seems to be really struggling to deal with the floating sidebar in AppKit. It still has hard cut offs in various apps, and now it renders under a toolbar in fullscreen mode.

Stephan Michels:

I noticed a similar cut-off in my app. The glass effect have a very wide shadow, which doesn’t not spread across containers, in my case a scroll view without background. Ugly 🧐

Steve Troughton-Smith:

🤔 [System Settings]

Riccardo Mori:

Glass and transparency can be fun when used meaningfully. Look at the battery indicator in Mac OS X 10.0.3. It wasn’t a menu extra, but a live indicator in the Dock (called ‘dockling’).

Sindre Sorhus:

Menu item icons in macOS 26 reduce usability – should be optional

Update (2025-07-09): hyperjeff:

And we’re all agreed that this image of a loupe has almost nothing at all to do with the functionality of Preview, right? I have a loupe irl, and never use it to read an article, no matter how small the font. (I never really noticed the loupe in the previous icons, because it was just a small added element, but now I’m confused why it was ever used.)

Isaiah Carew:

the old HIG said document based apps should have icons with a top down image to symbolized the doc. And a tool that one might use on with type of thing.

Xcode uses a blueprint and a hammer. Obviously those are not used in coding, they’re symbols for design and building.

Liquid Glass took away the document and left only the tool. Preview is a great example of why that’s nuts. Without the document the tool makes no sense.

URedditor:

Fun fact:

Apple had another installer icon ready before they went with this. It was much darker & the arrow was basically just a hole in the icon.

Looks like there’s a some waffling — a lack of confidence, which is also apparent if u look at the blur effects in iOS 26 beta 3.

Thomas Brand:

The best part of Tahoe Beta 3 is that it no longer tries to give me a seizure when I scroll content under the toolbar in the Finder.

Pierre Igot:

At this point, it might be worth wondering if the Apple engineers working on macOS Tahoe are using Retina screenshots (i.e. double size) to review their own work, instead of looking at things at actual size on actual Retina displays. I have Retina displays exclusively, and at actual size the 2025 icon looks like it has fuzzy coloured bullets, not the snazzy, highly detailed thing that I see when I look at the Retina screenshot in double size.

Update (2025-07-10): Cabel Sasser:

Quick Look in Tahoe wants to preview your image in a very significant round rect — and so, when you preview a tiny little 32 × 32 square icon, it becomes round! 🫥

Update (2025-07-14): Mario Guzmán:

The standard/off state for #macOSTahoe controls are so pale and lack so much detail that they straight up look like disabled controls.

Liquid Glass styles got an over-correction in detail and realism while everything else got flatter and more basic.

This is as bad as Windows 8.

Steve Streza:

I get that the change to Apple Silicon is a once-in-a-blue-moon change that was pretty drastic in terms of performance, but wow, does macOS Tahoe feel like shit on a then-top-of-the-line Intel MacBook Pro. Even doing nothing, with nothing open, stuff just lags.

This was the “we’re taking pros seriously” notebook they came out with in 2019. I don’t expect it to sing like a new M4, but this is… so unpleasant.

Michael Flarup:

Apple is making subtle tweaks to reduce fuzziness in Liquid Glass icons by increasing stroke thickness and contrast. Beta 2 vs Beta 3[…]

Mario Guzmán:

I know this is still beta and this is a bug. There is no need to get angry about it. But this is pretty fun to do.

Update (2025-07-15): Mario Guzmán:

I know I keep calling things out but Liquid Glass has to be the most distracting style of UI I have ever used.

I have to scan icons and labels more than ever before because everything is just blended together with soft gradient masks and blurry backgrounds.

Any designer think that Spotlight now is impossible to read? Holy hell… this is good design?

Collin Donnell:

Fundamental GUI decisions on the Mac came from deep thought and even formal research. Has that hard earned knowledge been thrown out over time by people who didn’t deeply understand it? Someone smarter than me would know.

The obsession the last few years with lowering information density, hiding UI behind hover in things like toolbars where there’s no space gained, and showing blurred versions of content behind controls doesn’t make any sense to me.

Update (2025-07-16): Jeff Johnson:

Above is the popup window of my Safari extension ChangeTheHeaders on macOS 26. Notice that the scroll bar is clipped at the top! This is why corner radius matters. It's not just an aesthetic choice. Design is how it works, and Liquid Glass does not work right.

Dave Nanian:

So, what exactly is, say, your Mom supposed to do with a notification like this?

Update (2025-07-17): Mario Guzmán:

I really hope the Music team addresses this but if you look ahead the music track progress bar, it is so blurry. If you zoom in, you can see that nothing is pixel-aligned in either state.

I don’t even know how this happens. Shouldn’t happen using a native control. If you’re custom drawing, you should know to check that the bounds/frame you’re drawing in is using whole numbers…

Actually even some of the buttons still aren’t pixel-aligned.

Update (2025-07-21): Craig Hockenberry:

There are so many things wrong here and none of them are the fault of the Passwords app.

I’m an expert user and I had to hunt around for a way to SAVE some new information. And DELETE is the absolute last thing I want to see when dealing with passwords.

Then, does up/down and + apply to the list or the selected item? Resizing the window doesn’t resolve this ambiguity - you have to resize the window and divider.

Then, there’s the accessibility on what I’m trying to select…

Update (2025-07-22): Tony Arnold:

I look forward to future macOS 26/Tahoe betas, because Liquid Glass feels so utterly unfinished in the current betas.

I honestly don’t know if some of the problems in this design are fixable without completely unwinding the point of it in the process.

Previously:

• macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 4

Apple Password Manager Icons Liquid Glass Mac macOS Beta macOS Tahoe 26 Music.app Preview.app Quick Look Reminders Safari Screensaver Software Update Spotlight System Preferences Terminal Wallpaper

8 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

Leave a Comment

Name

E-mail (will not be published)

Web site

Δ