Discussion
The Window Chrome of Our Discontent
SoKamil: 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.
inatreecrown2: 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.
Synaesthesia: 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.
maliker: 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.
igtztorrero: 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: 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.
PKop: 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.
hbn: 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: I really want something between Sequoia and Tahoe. 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.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.
afandian: 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: 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.
lateforwork: 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/
derefr: 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.)
wffurr: 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.
vintagedave: 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: 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 .
