liquid glass is a UI sin

Upgrade

September 2025. Boot up my Mac, open settings, "software update available". macOS 26 Tahoe has arrived.

Download, install, reboot. Skip through the setup dialogue. Business as usual, open a terminal, browse photos in Finder, play a song in a music player. Something feels off, but the novelty of this new version is still in full force, so I chalk it up to the human resistance to change.

Downgrade

Five months later, I've downgraded my Mac back to Sequoia. One of the driving factors behind this was Liquid Glass; it had become downright infuriating, these blobby, bubbly, semi-transparent animated buttons refracting text and imagery from the background, engorged, glassy pimples that never burst.

That was just the aesthetic half of the issue, worse still was the abysmal visibility of Liquid Glass surfaces, the symbols or text on them were readable, but the glass itself would just blend into whatever was in the background. These disembodied icons and words were visually exhausting to parse and interact with.

Regression

The design language of macOS and its native applications for the last ~11 years (since Yosemite) leading up to Tahoe had been overwhelmingly flat; history doesn't just disappear. Strip away the Liquid Glass elements (such as the control panel, buttons, and sliders) and you'll find a very flat environment.

This (re)introduction of overtly three-dimensional elements onto a modern flat foundation is a problem. Against that backdrop, refractive, glassy elements stick out like a sore thumb, looking jarring and distracting, sometimes, even amateurish.

Come June 2026, Apple shows off macOS 27 Golden Gate and iOS 27 at WWDC26, guess what they're adding? A Liquid Glass slider to replace the existing clear and tinted options. At the least glassy end it seems to resemble a tasteful, mid-opacity frosted surface, with barely any refraction, a step in the right direction, but the "raised" edges of Liquid Glass elements still remain.

That's good news and all, but right now, you can already neuter the refractive and transparent properties of Liquid Glass through a couple of buried accessibility settings. Unfortunately, just like the slider, these still do not remove the faux-3D edges from the affected elements. This is ultimately a Liquid Glass problem, and while band-aid fixes for accessibility are appreciated, they still do not address the underlying aesthetic dissonance inflicted.