7 ms·

The window chrome of our discontent

164 points by zdw 8mo ago

inatreecrown2 8mo ago
Unbelievable how bad the latest version of Pages looks against the oldest in the example. The "chrome" part - the buttons without labels, I have no idea what most of them would do and just glancing at them gives me a headache.
- masswerk 8mo ago
  It's still impressing how the entire chrome can be collapsed into a single background bit of information, indicating a presence that may be attended to for interaction. In contrast, the newer interfaces seem to be made to reduce the attention span anyone may apply to the content. (It's really stress inducing.)
- Synaesthesia 8mo ago
  It can be good to reduce chrome and focus on content, and have minimal UI's but there's a limit. Your UI still has to be discoverable, and intuitive. With everything hidden away it's unfriendly, particularly for new users.
  - oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago
    Sure, but why can't we have both? Sensible, usable defaults for new users, configurable views for everyone else. I'd like a version of Pages where I can turn off the toolbar, turn off the title bar, fullscreen the remaining window and focus purely on the document. That really shouldn't be difficult.
    - Synaesthesia 8mo ago
      Absolutely. It's totally doable. But Apple is swinging a bit too far into the minimal aesthetic right now.
    - carlosjobim 8mo ago
      It would be extremely easy to have both. Tab to hide/show chrome and controls. The Affinity software does this, and it's intuitive and works flawlessly.
      - derefr 8mo ago
        I presume the difficult question there, would be what you would expect users to do to engage with that mechanism on iOS (since many Apple first-party apps, e.g. Notes, are now designed once to run on macOS + iPadOS + iOS as essentially a single [responsive] UI.)
        oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago
        I'd say, if it doesn't make sense to have the equivalent feature on iOS, just leave it out.
  - PKop 8mo ago
    I don't understand how decreasing the contrast between content and chrome helps you "focus" on content. The older design screenshot has better content clarity than the current design.
- vintagedave 8mo ago
  I'll say. It really shows what we have lost. I deeply miss old OS X.
SoKamil 8mo ago
Since Big Sur redesign, light mode on macOS is borderline unusable. I need contrast in order to differentiate content. I need contrast on buttons to know where to click and what is clickable. I don’t need to depend on muscle memory. On Catalina it was automatic. Chrome in moderation is not bad.
vintagedave 8mo ago
The curious thing about 'bringing users’ content front and centre' or 'greater focus on your content' is that in the Tahoe redesign, the document and the window merge so much that the content (the document) is less visible. They blur together. I can't see which is document and which is chrome. This is the article's point, but... how can Apple be saying what they have, when I feel that since Big Sur at least it's not only perceptively but arguably objectively not true?
- wpm 8mo ago
  My favorite rendition of this phenomenon is video player controls that only appear if you mouse over the content. So, if I want to pause a video to focus on something, god help me if that something is in the lower third of the frame and centered (for Quicktime Player on macOS) or in the lower 100 pixels (YouTube), because odds are the fucking play/pause button is going to block it and it won't fade away if the video is paused. But we're making the UI gEt OuT oF tHe WaY .
  - matheusmoreira 8mo ago
    Yeah. They just plaster the UI elements all over the video, VHS style, and they remain on screen for several seconds. Browsers are particularly obnoxious: they display a giant icon right in the middle of the video. Depending on screen size and orientation, it can straight up block the entire content for several seconds, or indefinitely if the video is paused. One of so many reasons why I love mpv so much. Fine control via keyboard, allows turning off all the UI elements. Always a pleasure to use. I hate having to use any other media player.
maliker 8mo ago
I'll play slight devil's advocate. The buttons in the toolbar are duplicative of the options in the menubar, and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. You can't turn off the menubar items, so I end up turning off the toolbar. So I don't care what that part of the UI looks like, and the sidebar for formatting they added, as pointed out in the article, uses the horizontal space on screens better than options stretched out over the full width of the menu. Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements. Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.
- kccqzy 8mo ago
  When I used to use Pages frequently I just memorized all the relevant keyboard shortcuts and turned off the entire toolbar. It’s easy: for each button in the toolbar find the equivalent in the menu, and the shortcut is written on the menu item itself. That’s, however, entirely unacceptable for most users. The sidebar for formatting they added is strictly worse than the inspector UI in old Pages ’09. The sidebar is constrained not to overlap with content, but the user can choose to overlap the inspector. It’s strictly better flexibility for users. If you are doing a lot of fine adjustments to a single text box, then of course it’s fewer mouse movement if the inspector is located right next to the text box, despite that it has obscured other irrelevant text boxes. I dearly miss Pages ’09.
- eviks 8mo ago
  > and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. No one forces you to, you can learn it only once for the toolbar as it's 1 click instead of many clicks for menu navigation. Just like when you use shortcuts you don't need to remember where the command is in the menu?
afandian 8mo ago
Maybe I just don't get it, but the first example the controls are out of the way, leaving most the space for the content. In subsequent examples the controls have made less space for content and obscured it. And takes up space with less-often used things like line spacing and and drop caps. Feels like I'm being told that up is down. And the smudgy liquid glass effect just makes everything look grubby. Not classy.
- c-hendricks 8mo ago
  To me it definitely looks like the area for the document grew. The sidebar is a solution to not tacking a million things into the toolbar, it's not like it's open 100% of the time.
jmull 8mo ago
Of these all, I prefer the Big Sur design language, which this article calls an “atrocious regression”. Arguing aesthetics is pretty pointless (it’s a decided question to me: my taste is great; most others have very poor taste). What bothers me about Tahoe are all the sloppy bits, like things you can no longer click or scroll to. We’re on 26.3.1 now and it looks/works like 1.0.
- cachius 8mo ago
  > We’re on 26.3.1 I'm still on macOS Sonoma 14 and iOS 18
- wtallis 8mo ago
  I think it's arrogant to call this merely "arguing aesthetics" unless you can point to real usability studies that say removing color from icons does not impair their legibility and recognizability, or that reducing contrast does not similarly have detrimental effects. What really matters is not how the screenshots look, but how easy it is to use the software in action, with low error rate and without having to spend more than a fraction of a second finding the controls you need.
  - jmull 8mo ago
    If you want to claim an objective difference, then you need to be the one to substantiate that. Anyway, we know people read symbols by shape/lines/pattern just fine without color because that's how reading works. > What really matters is not how the screenshots look, but how easy it is to use the software in action, with low error rate and without having to spend more than a fraction of a second finding the controls you need. Indeed. Which is why this article is mostly blowing wind.
    - pseudalopex 8mo ago
      https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/why-your-users-value-color-icons-more-than-you-may-think/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/why-your-u...
igtztorrero 8mo ago
Few software companies consider this: users appreciate it when the interface remains constant over time, and especially if we can continue using previous versions without being forced to change, since learning new things again takes time.
- baggachipz 8mo ago
  It's laughable how often companies redesign the UI, when it's counter to what their users want. Nobody wants to re-learn how to interact with their software. Gradual changes, sure, but a total redesign and then releasing it as a "feature" is such a turn-off to so many people.
- ValentineC 8mo ago
  My biggest fear with macOS right now is that because there's no LTS version, I'll eventually be forced to upgrade in 2-3 years if I want to use some new apps compiled by some hipster developers who use Xcode 28/29 and don't care about old versions. Homebrew doesn't support any macOS version that isn't supported by Apple either.
netbioserror 8mo ago
Side-by-side, it's incredibly clear that the newest version is total UX garbage. Monochrome icons were a complete mistake, in basically all cases everywhere. A mix of the Lion color, shape/texture, and spacing, plus the Catalina sidebar, would be the best. I really REALLY love the Lion icons. Colorful but subdued with only mild saturation, distinctive shapes, strong line borders with very slight halo, and mild gradients to make them pop.
hbn 8mo ago
Liquid Glass on macOS is such a joke. Most of the redesign was just turning buttons into Fisher Price-looking circles and ovals. I'm typing this from Safari which looks so stupid in Tahoe. The tab bar is a giant oblong oval with a bunch of tab titles and icons floating on a solid background, only separated by a short, faint vertical bar that doesn't go to the top/bottom to truly separate them. The current active tab is a small oblong oval within the giant oval. The perfect visual metaphor for tabs which Safari set the trend for in macOS is gone. And then just above is a bunch more ovals and circles. The sidebar button is an oval, the back/forward buttons are in an oval, the Wipr extension icon is in an oval, the URL bar is an oblong over, etc. And (at least in light mode) this is all white ovals on a white background. It all looks so amateurish. I'm so glad that Hack Alan Dye is gone and I pray to God that Stephen Lamay can get us back to reason. I doubt they'll do an overnight Cmd+Z update in macOS 28 or whatever, but perhaps he can direct Liquid Glass in a direction that isn't just rounding things for the sake of it.
- LoganDark 8mo ago
  I really want something between Sequoia and Tahoe. (Probably mostly Sequoia, but with targeted applications of Liquid Glass.) I don't like how Tahoe treats everything as floating on top, as if properly dividing windows into sidebars and panels is wrong... There's so much extra padding and rounding now, I hate it. Everything's lost the depth, detail and cleanliness it used to have, replaced by this bubbly mess. Like, sheets don't even slide out anymore, they overlay like on iOS. The charm, expressivity, and, well, Mac-ness is gone. I love Liquid Glass - the blur and refractive effects are so pretty and technically impressive - but it should be used tastefully instead of this nonsense. I feel like Tahoe in general is straying way, way too far from the battle-tested Cocoa foundation and into this total top-down crap. Liquid Glass feels like some sort of shareholder-enforced enshittification. macOS is supposed to be defined from the bottom up; it always has been. There has always been importance in having a solid base; a robust foundation for developers to build on. HIG, Cocoa, CoreGraphics, all of that is in service of this. The user experience and vertical integration is a result of this and couldn't exist without it. There's so much wrong with Tahoe that goes against everything Mac has ever been. We don't want to dumb down the interface; that has never been the goal. The goal has always been to make the interface intuitive enough that anyone can learn it. macOS and iOS are fundamentally different platforms with fundamentally different design constraints and considerations. Icons being able to escape the squircle was supposed to be a reflection of the fact that apps on Mac are less contained than apps on iOS. They have more expressive power and more advanced capabilities. You're working closer to the metal and in a less controlled environment. Because of that, you can do more and you're not constrained to the flows of the system. iOS always hasn't been this. The constraints of touch are different than the constraints of the desktop. Steve Jobs spoke about this a lot back in his day, about why iOS is so much more locked-down than Mac. But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control. And Tahoe strips the soul of that.
djfdat 8mo ago
I think the idea of the Window Chrome "getting out of the way" of the user is a good concept, but we fail to consider what the user expects at arms length. We also have to consider the chicken-or-egg problem In the example, we have a sidebar for the formatting in the newer example vs havign that in the toolbar in Lion. Was it that back then, people were more likely to configure fonts & formatting settings, and we've gradually as a society de-emphasized our formatting in word processing? Or did UI changes such as this, hiding formatting options push us towards a world where we care less about formatting? I'd like to think it's a bit of both; as the user-based broadened, you had less percentage-based people that cared so heavily about formatting, so UI changes were made to optimize for that, further pushing people in that direction. On a different note, I want to call out just how badly the sidebar is laid out compared to the toolbar. In the Lion toolbar, there were unlabeled sections but it was pretty clear what the purpose of each group was. Then you have the sidebar, where labels are added in some places, excessive space given where uneccesary, tabs that are sectioned off from the settings they'll show/hide, collapsible sections that can also be shown/hidden, some dropdowns using up/down caret while others just use the down caret, most dropdown carets being right-aligned but not the gear one, and in the liquid glass versions, the overlay of toolbar buttons over the sidebar creating confusion.
lateforwork 8mo ago
The "content over chrome" trend was started by Microsoft's Metro design language. Windows 8 and Metro are one of the biggest UI/UX disasters since the dawn of computing. Why would Apple keep copying the worst ideas from Microsoft? NNGroup has written about this trend: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-chrome-ratio/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-chrome-ratio/
- derefr 8mo ago
  Metro worked perfectly well on tablets. And every OS since W8 has actually kept some version of Metro (in the form of e.g. larger touch-targets), because having a single version of Windows UI for both touchscreen and mouse-and-keyboard computers, is what enabled the creation of the "2-in-1" or "convertible" touchscreen notebook, a design that basically every modern Windows notebook instantiates. Liquid Glass also makes more sense on tablets. I think Apple is copying Microsoft because Apple is also moving toward full UI-level unification between their desktop mouse-and-keyboard UI and their mobile/tablet touchscreen UI. They've already done it for some apps (e.g. Notes.)
  - lateforwork 8mo ago
    MacBook Neo is getting a lot of attention for good reason. It is a great laptop. The fact that it isn't "convertible touchscreen" notebook doesn't seem to bother anyone. Apple copying Microsoft is a mistake. It used to be the other way around.
  - beart 8mo ago
    The Windows 8 equivalent server edition also included the upgrade to Metro UI. I don't know, I guess MS figured IT wanted to provision Windows services using a surface tablet? I actually really did like Windows Phones though. I can imagine a world with a third competitor in that space today... But MS didn't seem to have any understanding or ability to develop an ecosystem that works. Even when they were literally paying people to write apps for their app store, it was just terrible.
  - signal11 8mo ago
    If you believe the rumor mill, Touch-enabled Macs may launch this year[1]. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-ultra/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-...
drooopy 8mo ago
Oh, man... What I wouldn't give to have Pages (and other apps) appear like they did in OS X Lion. This is just depressing.
- wobfan 8mo ago
  While I feel so too, I do actually think that objectively Catalina is a UX-side step up. Current displays have 16:9 or even 3:2. Putting less things in the top bar and more stuff in the sidebar, especially in something like Pages where your content does not even fill half of your display horizontally, I think it makes sense.
  - systoll 8mo ago
    From the first version of iWork, the inspector panel had the same basic purpose and layout as the sidebar. (Screenshot: http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/120609-inspector-windows.png http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/120609-inspector-win... ). The formatting bar was an (IMO unnecessary) option added in iWork 08. With iWork 2016, they took the existing inspector panel setup and docked it into each window.
wffurr 8mo ago
Why do they do this? I just don't understand the regression in user interfaces in the major operating systems over the years. Is there some academic discourse about this? Is there some trend in UX or designer education that's produced this? It can't be just change for change's sake as there's a trend to minimize the OS chrome to the point that it's unusable.
- graemep 8mo ago
  Its partly driven by wanting to match mobile design, but I think more putting more value on aesthetics and usability. From a commercial point of view branding and how it looks is more important. People buy what looks simple - they are not going to spend time trying something out to asses what is simple.
- bityard 8mo ago
  The trend is "less is more". For the past decade, UX designers have fetishized flat, monochrome, low-contrast designs with zero visual cues or opportunities for feature discovery. From what I'm to gather, their idea of a perfect computer is an empty white (or black) screen on which you can do absolutely nothing except yell out, "um, hey Siri? Are you there?" I do wonder if we'll see the pendulum swing the other direction. We used to have UX designers that actually studied users and how best to mold the interface to them. I think now is the best time ever to get into UX design and make your mark by showing the world that software doesn't _have_ to be flat, lifeless, and radiused to hell and back in order to be great.
  - wffurr 8mo ago
    >> For the past decade, UX designers have fetishized flat, monochrome, low-contrast designs with zero visual cues or opportunities for feature discovery Yeah but why? Is it just a design trend? Is it just fashion? Or is there some underlying reason why it went this way?
    - duskdozer 8mo ago
      I think it's just the "modern" and "fresh" aesthetic like skeuomorphism or bubbles/metal were at the time. Just with mobile-first in mind
vjvjvjvjghv 8mo ago
The Lion screenshot is just perfect. Everything you need to do is right there. And with every version from then on the usability goes downhill and stuff you need to do is more and more hidden and requires several clicks to access. Pretty sad state of affairs. Software isn’t build for usability but purely for whatever designers find fashionable at the time.
skywhopper 8mo ago
“Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise“ I can guarantee you they have done no such research. This redesign is a clear top-down imposition to make the visual language uniform and match some lead designer’s specs, not to actually make anything more useful or usable.
aaroninsf 8mo ago
Nothing enrages like change.
wolpoli 8mo ago
None of the reason for the redesign in 2014, 2020 and 2025 had anything to do with solving any problem users had with the interface. The goals were just to blend controls and content visually and make the interface feel fresh, which I doubt that any users were asking for in the first place.
nycticorax 8mo ago
The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!
- beachy 8mo ago
  For some reason UI taste influencers have outsized influence within companies. IMO it's because they have the ear of execs who react viscerally to eye candy - as we all do - but lack understanding of basic usability principles. As an exec sitting there frustrated by the slow pace of software development, at least you can always yell at the UI guy and demand changes that your gut tells you "look cool", and you can be an active, though uninformed particpant in sessions with design mockups. Car UIs are a great case in point. People have been yelling for years at the poor usability of touchscreens in cars as opposed to discrete buttons/controls. Yet the enshittification of car UIs continues unchecked. My ioniq 5 has multiple touch panels and buttons, yet something as simple as directing air flow to the dash vents requires me to prod at a tiny touch area and look at a separate tiny display area well away from the touch control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate instantly by touch alone. My workaround now is to prod the control, wait for 5 seconds to see if I feel air start flowing, and if not, prod the control and wait again. Peak usability of most computer UIs was back in the 90s when simple (to use) but deep and powerful hierarchical menus were uniformly placed at the top of the page, and right clicking on objects in the UI opened context-sensitive popup hierarchical menus. For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.
  - badc0ffee 8mo ago
    My 2018 RAV4 has physical buttons, and the touchscreen is only used for the backup camera, and the audio system and phone (their own UI for contacts, calls, etc. and not something like CarPlay). I'm hoping whatever model I replace it with will have physical controls too.
wobfan 8mo ago
The biggest problem of all this crappy development in Windows and macOS is that they just threw customization out of the window. Remember Windows 98, when you could actually just right click on the Desktop and select your own colors for basically everything in the UI. With each Windows it got less, until in Vista and 7 only like 10% remained. This continues to get less. This is pushing AI down my throat (+ privacy, but IMO Apple is at least okay-ish in this regard) is my main reason why my next laptop will not run macOS. Maybe Asahi Linux will finally support Thunderbolt, but maybe I'll just switch to a Framework. I'm just happy that I stayed on 15.7.5 until now. As soon as this gets no updates anymore, I'm gone.
JaggerJo 8mo ago
Let’s hope macOS 27 fixes liquid glass. For now I’m not updating.
eviks 8mo ago
Is there any hope for these incompetent design churners to realize that users can do better and give us some power? Like, why can't I simply tweak a few things in a visual designer and have that as my toolbar design in all toolbars written with the standard Apple GUI framework? (or find a mod written by someone other better designer?) Then any OS upgrade would simply be an extra theme suggested by the OS that I can safely ignore and continue to use my own without breaking my workflow?

164 points by zdw 8mo ago

Unbelievable how bad the latest version of Pages looks against the oldest in the example. The "chrome" part - the buttons without labels, I have no idea what most of them would do and just glancing at them gives me a headache.

masswerk 8mo ago
It's still impressing how the entire chrome can be collapsed into a single background bit of information, indicating a presence that may be attended to for interaction. In contrast, the newer interfaces seem to be made to reduce the attention span anyone may apply to the content. (It's really stress inducing.)
Synaesthesia 8mo ago
It can be good to reduce chrome and focus on content, and have minimal UI's but there's a limit. Your UI still has to be discoverable, and intuitive. With everything hidden away it's unfriendly, particularly for new users.
- oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago
  Sure, but why can't we have both? Sensible, usable defaults for new users, configurable views for everyone else. I'd like a version of Pages where I can turn off the toolbar, turn off the title bar, fullscreen the remaining window and focus purely on the document. That really shouldn't be difficult.
  - Synaesthesia 8mo ago
    Absolutely. It's totally doable. But Apple is swinging a bit too far into the minimal aesthetic right now.
  - carlosjobim 8mo ago
    It would be extremely easy to have both. Tab to hide/show chrome and controls. The Affinity software does this, and it's intuitive and works flawlessly.
    - derefr 8mo ago
      I presume the difficult question there, would be what you would expect users to do to engage with that mechanism on iOS (since many Apple first-party apps, e.g. Notes, are now designed once to run on macOS + iPadOS + iOS as essentially a single [responsive] UI.)
      - oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago
        I'd say, if it doesn't make sense to have the equivalent feature on iOS, just leave it out.
- PKop 8mo ago
  I don't understand how decreasing the contrast between content and chrome helps you "focus" on content. The older design screenshot has better content clarity than the current design.
vintagedave 8mo ago
I'll say. It really shows what we have lost. I deeply miss old OS X.

SoKamil 8mo ago

Since Big Sur redesign, light mode on macOS is borderline unusable. I need contrast in order to differentiate content. I need contrast on buttons to know where to click and what is clickable. I don’t need to depend on muscle memory. On Catalina it was automatic. Chrome in moderation is not bad.

vintagedave 8mo ago

The curious thing about 'bringing users’ content front and centre' or 'greater focus on your content' is that in the Tahoe redesign, the document and the window merge so much that the content (the document) is less visible. They blur together. I can't see which is document and which is chrome. This is the article's point, but... how can Apple be saying what they have, when I feel that since Big Sur at least it's not only perceptively but arguably objectively not true?

wpm 8mo ago
My favorite rendition of this phenomenon is video player controls that only appear if you mouse over the content. So, if I want to pause a video to focus on something, god help me if that something is in the lower third of the frame and centered (for Quicktime Player on macOS) or in the lower 100 pixels (YouTube), because odds are the fucking play/pause button is going to block it and it won't fade away if the video is paused. But we're making the UI gEt OuT oF tHe WaY .
- matheusmoreira 8mo ago
  Yeah. They just plaster the UI elements all over the video, VHS style, and they remain on screen for several seconds. Browsers are particularly obnoxious: they display a giant icon right in the middle of the video. Depending on screen size and orientation, it can straight up block the entire content for several seconds, or indefinitely if the video is paused. One of so many reasons why I love mpv so much. Fine control via keyboard, allows turning off all the UI elements. Always a pleasure to use. I hate having to use any other media player.

maliker 8mo ago

I'll play slight devil's advocate. The buttons in the toolbar are duplicative of the options in the menubar, and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. You can't turn off the menubar items, so I end up turning off the toolbar. So I don't care what that part of the UI looks like, and the sidebar for formatting they added, as pointed out in the article, uses the horizontal space on screens better than options stretched out over the full width of the menu. Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements. Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.

kccqzy 8mo ago
When I used to use Pages frequently I just memorized all the relevant keyboard shortcuts and turned off the entire toolbar. It’s easy: for each button in the toolbar find the equivalent in the menu, and the shortcut is written on the menu item itself. That’s, however, entirely unacceptable for most users. The sidebar for formatting they added is strictly worse than the inspector UI in old Pages ’09. The sidebar is constrained not to overlap with content, but the user can choose to overlap the inspector. It’s strictly better flexibility for users. If you are doing a lot of fine adjustments to a single text box, then of course it’s fewer mouse movement if the inspector is located right next to the text box, despite that it has obscured other irrelevant text boxes. I dearly miss Pages ’09.
eviks 8mo ago
> and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. No one forces you to, you can learn it only once for the toolbar as it's 1 click instead of many clicks for menu navigation. Just like when you use shortcuts you don't need to remember where the command is in the menu?

afandian 8mo ago

Maybe I just don't get it, but the first example the controls are out of the way, leaving most the space for the content. In subsequent examples the controls have made less space for content and obscured it. And takes up space with less-often used things like line spacing and and drop caps. Feels like I'm being told that up is down. And the smudgy liquid glass effect just makes everything look grubby. Not classy.

c-hendricks 8mo ago
To me it definitely looks like the area for the document grew. The sidebar is a solution to not tacking a million things into the toolbar, it's not like it's open 100% of the time.

jmull 8mo ago

Of these all, I prefer the Big Sur design language, which this article calls an “atrocious regression”. Arguing aesthetics is pretty pointless (it’s a decided question to me: my taste is great; most others have very poor taste). What bothers me about Tahoe are all the sloppy bits, like things you can no longer click or scroll to. We’re on 26.3.1 now and it looks/works like 1.0.

cachius 8mo ago
> We’re on 26.3.1 I'm still on macOS Sonoma 14 and iOS 18
wtallis 8mo ago
I think it's arrogant to call this merely "arguing aesthetics" unless you can point to real usability studies that say removing color from icons does not impair their legibility and recognizability, or that reducing contrast does not similarly have detrimental effects. What really matters is not how the screenshots look, but how easy it is to use the software in action, with low error rate and without having to spend more than a fraction of a second finding the controls you need.
- jmull 8mo ago
  If you want to claim an objective difference, then you need to be the one to substantiate that. Anyway, we know people read symbols by shape/lines/pattern just fine without color because that's how reading works. > What really matters is not how the screenshots look, but how easy it is to use the software in action, with low error rate and without having to spend more than a fraction of a second finding the controls you need. Indeed. Which is why this article is mostly blowing wind.
  - pseudalopex 8mo ago
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/why-your-users-value-color-icons-more-than-you-may-think/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/why-your-u...

igtztorrero 8mo ago

Few software companies consider this: users appreciate it when the interface remains constant over time, and especially if we can continue using previous versions without being forced to change, since learning new things again takes time.

baggachipz 8mo ago
It's laughable how often companies redesign the UI, when it's counter to what their users want. Nobody wants to re-learn how to interact with their software. Gradual changes, sure, but a total redesign and then releasing it as a "feature" is such a turn-off to so many people.
ValentineC 8mo ago
My biggest fear with macOS right now is that because there's no LTS version, I'll eventually be forced to upgrade in 2-3 years if I want to use some new apps compiled by some hipster developers who use Xcode 28/29 and don't care about old versions. Homebrew doesn't support any macOS version that isn't supported by Apple either.

netbioserror 8mo ago

Side-by-side, it's incredibly clear that the newest version is total UX garbage. Monochrome icons were a complete mistake, in basically all cases everywhere. A mix of the Lion color, shape/texture, and spacing, plus the Catalina sidebar, would be the best. I really REALLY love the Lion icons. Colorful but subdued with only mild saturation, distinctive shapes, strong line borders with very slight halo, and mild gradients to make them pop.

hbn 8mo ago

Liquid Glass on macOS is such a joke. Most of the redesign was just turning buttons into Fisher Price-looking circles and ovals. I'm typing this from Safari which looks so stupid in Tahoe. The tab bar is a giant oblong oval with a bunch of tab titles and icons floating on a solid background, only separated by a short, faint vertical bar that doesn't go to the top/bottom to truly separate them. The current active tab is a small oblong oval within the giant oval. The perfect visual metaphor for tabs which Safari set the trend for in macOS is gone. And then just above is a bunch more ovals and circles. The sidebar button is an oval, the back/forward buttons are in an oval, the Wipr extension icon is in an oval, the URL bar is an oblong over, etc. And (at least in light mode) this is all white ovals on a white background. It all looks so amateurish. I'm so glad that Hack Alan Dye is gone and I pray to God that Stephen Lamay can get us back to reason. I doubt they'll do an overnight Cmd+Z update in macOS 28 or whatever, but perhaps he can direct Liquid Glass in a direction that isn't just rounding things for the sake of it.

LoganDark 8mo ago
I really want something between Sequoia and Tahoe. (Probably mostly Sequoia, but with targeted applications of Liquid Glass.) I don't like how Tahoe treats everything as floating on top, as if properly dividing windows into sidebars and panels is wrong... There's so much extra padding and rounding now, I hate it. Everything's lost the depth, detail and cleanliness it used to have, replaced by this bubbly mess. Like, sheets don't even slide out anymore, they overlay like on iOS. The charm, expressivity, and, well, Mac-ness is gone. I love Liquid Glass - the blur and refractive effects are so pretty and technically impressive - but it should be used tastefully instead of this nonsense. I feel like Tahoe in general is straying way, way too far from the battle-tested Cocoa foundation and into this total top-down crap. Liquid Glass feels like some sort of shareholder-enforced enshittification. macOS is supposed to be defined from the bottom up; it always has been. There has always been importance in having a solid base; a robust foundation for developers to build on. HIG, Cocoa, CoreGraphics, all of that is in service of this. The user experience and vertical integration is a result of this and couldn't exist without it. There's so much wrong with Tahoe that goes against everything Mac has ever been. We don't want to dumb down the interface; that has never been the goal. The goal has always been to make the interface intuitive enough that anyone can learn it. macOS and iOS are fundamentally different platforms with fundamentally different design constraints and considerations. Icons being able to escape the squircle was supposed to be a reflection of the fact that apps on Mac are less contained than apps on iOS. They have more expressive power and more advanced capabilities. You're working closer to the metal and in a less controlled environment. Because of that, you can do more and you're not constrained to the flows of the system. iOS always hasn't been this. The constraints of touch are different than the constraints of the desktop. Steve Jobs spoke about this a lot back in his day, about why iOS is so much more locked-down than Mac. But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control. And Tahoe strips the soul of that.

djfdat 8mo ago

I think the idea of the Window Chrome "getting out of the way" of the user is a good concept, but we fail to consider what the user expects at arms length. We also have to consider the chicken-or-egg problem In the example, we have a sidebar for the formatting in the newer example vs havign that in the toolbar in Lion. Was it that back then, people were more likely to configure fonts & formatting settings, and we've gradually as a society de-emphasized our formatting in word processing? Or did UI changes such as this, hiding formatting options push us towards a world where we care less about formatting? I'd like to think it's a bit of both; as the user-based broadened, you had less percentage-based people that cared so heavily about formatting, so UI changes were made to optimize for that, further pushing people in that direction. On a different note, I want to call out just how badly the sidebar is laid out compared to the toolbar. In the Lion toolbar, there were unlabeled sections but it was pretty clear what the purpose of each group was. Then you have the sidebar, where labels are added in some places, excessive space given where uneccesary, tabs that are sectioned off from the settings they'll show/hide, collapsible sections that can also be shown/hidden, some dropdowns using up/down caret while others just use the down caret, most dropdown carets being right-aligned but not the gear one, and in the liquid glass versions, the overlay of toolbar buttons over the sidebar creating confusion.

lateforwork 8mo ago

The "content over chrome" trend was started by Microsoft's Metro design language. Windows 8 and Metro are one of the biggest UI/UX disasters since the dawn of computing. Why would Apple keep copying the worst ideas from Microsoft? NNGroup has written about this trend: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-chrome-ratio/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-chrome-ratio/

derefr 8mo ago
Metro worked perfectly well on tablets. And every OS since W8 has actually kept some version of Metro (in the form of e.g. larger touch-targets), because having a single version of Windows UI for both touchscreen and mouse-and-keyboard computers, is what enabled the creation of the "2-in-1" or "convertible" touchscreen notebook, a design that basically every modern Windows notebook instantiates. Liquid Glass also makes more sense on tablets. I think Apple is copying Microsoft because Apple is also moving toward full UI-level unification between their desktop mouse-and-keyboard UI and their mobile/tablet touchscreen UI. They've already done it for some apps (e.g. Notes.)
- lateforwork 8mo ago
  MacBook Neo is getting a lot of attention for good reason. It is a great laptop. The fact that it isn't "convertible touchscreen" notebook doesn't seem to bother anyone. Apple copying Microsoft is a mistake. It used to be the other way around.
- beart 8mo ago
  The Windows 8 equivalent server edition also included the upgrade to Metro UI. I don't know, I guess MS figured IT wanted to provision Windows services using a surface tablet? I actually really did like Windows Phones though. I can imagine a world with a third competitor in that space today... But MS didn't seem to have any understanding or ability to develop an ecosystem that works. Even when they were literally paying people to write apps for their app store, it was just terrible.
- signal11 8mo ago
  If you believe the rumor mill, Touch-enabled Macs may launch this year[1]. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-ultra/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-...

drooopy 8mo ago

Oh, man... What I wouldn't give to have Pages (and other apps) appear like they did in OS X Lion. This is just depressing.

wobfan 8mo ago
While I feel so too, I do actually think that objectively Catalina is a UX-side step up. Current displays have 16:9 or even 3:2. Putting less things in the top bar and more stuff in the sidebar, especially in something like Pages where your content does not even fill half of your display horizontally, I think it makes sense.
- systoll 8mo ago
  From the first version of iWork, the inspector panel had the same basic purpose and layout as the sidebar. (Screenshot: http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/120609-inspector-windows.png http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/120609-inspector-win... ). The formatting bar was an (IMO unnecessary) option added in iWork 08. With iWork 2016, they took the existing inspector panel setup and docked it into each window.

wffurr 8mo ago

Why do they do this? I just don't understand the regression in user interfaces in the major operating systems over the years. Is there some academic discourse about this? Is there some trend in UX or designer education that's produced this? It can't be just change for change's sake as there's a trend to minimize the OS chrome to the point that it's unusable.

graemep 8mo ago
Its partly driven by wanting to match mobile design, but I think more putting more value on aesthetics and usability. From a commercial point of view branding and how it looks is more important. People buy what looks simple - they are not going to spend time trying something out to asses what is simple.
bityard 8mo ago
The trend is "less is more". For the past decade, UX designers have fetishized flat, monochrome, low-contrast designs with zero visual cues or opportunities for feature discovery. From what I'm to gather, their idea of a perfect computer is an empty white (or black) screen on which you can do absolutely nothing except yell out, "um, hey Siri? Are you there?" I do wonder if we'll see the pendulum swing the other direction. We used to have UX designers that actually studied users and how best to mold the interface to them. I think now is the best time ever to get into UX design and make your mark by showing the world that software doesn't _have_ to be flat, lifeless, and radiused to hell and back in order to be great.
- wffurr 8mo ago
  >> For the past decade, UX designers have fetishized flat, monochrome, low-contrast designs with zero visual cues or opportunities for feature discovery Yeah but why? Is it just a design trend? Is it just fashion? Or is there some underlying reason why it went this way?
  - duskdozer 8mo ago
    I think it's just the "modern" and "fresh" aesthetic like skeuomorphism or bubbles/metal were at the time. Just with mobile-first in mind

vjvjvjvjghv 8mo ago

The Lion screenshot is just perfect. Everything you need to do is right there. And with every version from then on the usability goes downhill and stuff you need to do is more and more hidden and requires several clicks to access. Pretty sad state of affairs. Software isn’t build for usability but purely for whatever designers find fashionable at the time.

skywhopper 8mo ago

“Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise“ I can guarantee you they have done no such research. This redesign is a clear top-down imposition to make the visual language uniform and match some lead designer’s specs, not to actually make anything more useful or usable.

aaroninsf 8mo ago

Nothing enrages like change.

wolpoli 8mo ago

None of the reason for the redesign in 2014, 2020 and 2025 had anything to do with solving any problem users had with the interface. The goals were just to blend controls and content visually and make the interface feel fresh, which I doubt that any users were asking for in the first place.

nycticorax 8mo ago

The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!

beachy 8mo ago
For some reason UI taste influencers have outsized influence within companies. IMO it's because they have the ear of execs who react viscerally to eye candy - as we all do - but lack understanding of basic usability principles. As an exec sitting there frustrated by the slow pace of software development, at least you can always yell at the UI guy and demand changes that your gut tells you "look cool", and you can be an active, though uninformed particpant in sessions with design mockups. Car UIs are a great case in point. People have been yelling for years at the poor usability of touchscreens in cars as opposed to discrete buttons/controls. Yet the enshittification of car UIs continues unchecked. My ioniq 5 has multiple touch panels and buttons, yet something as simple as directing air flow to the dash vents requires me to prod at a tiny touch area and look at a separate tiny display area well away from the touch control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate instantly by touch alone. My workaround now is to prod the control, wait for 5 seconds to see if I feel air start flowing, and if not, prod the control and wait again. Peak usability of most computer UIs was back in the 90s when simple (to use) but deep and powerful hierarchical menus were uniformly placed at the top of the page, and right clicking on objects in the UI opened context-sensitive popup hierarchical menus. For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.
- badc0ffee 8mo ago
  My 2018 RAV4 has physical buttons, and the touchscreen is only used for the backup camera, and the audio system and phone (their own UI for contacts, calls, etc. and not something like CarPlay). I'm hoping whatever model I replace it with will have physical controls too.

wobfan 8mo ago

The biggest problem of all this crappy development in Windows and macOS is that they just threw customization out of the window. Remember Windows 98, when you could actually just right click on the Desktop and select your own colors for basically everything in the UI. With each Windows it got less, until in Vista and 7 only like 10% remained. This continues to get less. This is pushing AI down my throat (+ privacy, but IMO Apple is at least okay-ish in this regard) is my main reason why my next laptop will not run macOS. Maybe Asahi Linux will finally support Thunderbolt, but maybe I'll just switch to a Framework. I'm just happy that I stayed on 15.7.5 until now. As soon as this gets no updates anymore, I'm gone.

JaggerJo 8mo ago

Let’s hope macOS 27 fixes liquid glass. For now I’m not updating.

eviks 8mo ago

Is there any hope for these incompetent design churners to realize that users can do better and give us some power? Like, why can't I simply tweak a few things in a visual designer and have that as my toolbar design in all toolbars written with the standard Apple GUI framework? (or find a mod written by someone other better designer?) Then any OS upgrade would simply be an extra theme suggested by the OS that I can safely ignore and continue to use my own without breaking my workflow?