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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.
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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.
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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…
