Fluid Glass
chiuhans111.github.io
chiuhans111.github.io
We actually have plenty of algorithms for laying out text and images very quickly. You can see this when scrolling complex PDFs or sizable books on e.g. Apple devices. Even a complex web page can be very responsive if it makes smart use of JS and async calls, etc.
Perhaps what you mean is that the complexity of current web apps running on browsers that handle arbitrary layout, computation (JS, WebAssembly), async calls (e.g. analytics), etc can be laggy on certain mobile devices? If so, yes. There are many possible culprits so to speak that lead to low frame rates.
I would phrase it this way: the combination of advertising interests, compute power, and economics have led us to a place where lots of people face laggy interfaces.
Overall, this isn’t a “technological” problem: think of technology as a set of constraints. People and their desires lead to various “design” decisions (some more evolved than designed).
See also Wirth’s Law. I don’t think it is particularly insightful, however. These kinds of laws feel more like the ironic complaints of an ennui fueled graybeard than attempts to make proactive change. From Wikipedia:
> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
> The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, a computer scientist who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".
Note that some malicious and misguided right wingers are attacking and trying to subvert Wikipedia.
The designers on Liquid Glass are proud of it, and also disappointed that some of the design system did not make it into v1.0 code, so the reality is less legible than the designs indicated.
There is no designer in the world making bad designs as part of some conspiracy to enable their employer to launch improved designs several years later. There’s no company that operates that way.
New Coke / Coke Classic
Windows Vista / Windows 7
Office 2007 / Office 2010
It was same ugly design. But bug fixes are natural for later versions.
After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design.
Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to teach your mom or grandma how to use a new app.
To design a unified UI framework, you need a lot of things: common elements (e.g. date picker), typography (fonts, text styling), iconography (the same icon in every app for the Share button), etc. Both Apple annd Android vendors already have UI frameworks dictating these for native apps today.
The hard problem that remained unsolved until Liquid Glass is these UI toolkits can’t dictate a color for interactive elements, because every other app has its own, different color scheme. Any color you pick will inevitably look out of place in some apps. The answer here is, unsurprisingly, transparent elements.
But there is historically a huge issue with transparent elements, a hard problem where many previous attempts have failed: how can you make a transparent element (e.g a button) still be recognizable on various content?
Apple’s answer here works beautifully: make the controls appear floating an inch over the content, by mimicking the properties of the two most familiar physical transparent objects - water and glass.
But to suggest the current implementation in iOS and macOS isn't problematic would mean you'd need to be incredibly unaware of basic accessibility needs of a significant portion of people, and right now both operating systems have made it significantly worse. That's not a design opinion, its fact.
Liquid Glass is far from the first attempt at this. See “material design”. Apple has had UI guidelines for years now, and all of their apps were more or less as consistent as they are now after the transition. My complaint is that shiny effects aren’t necessary for UI consistency, and it slows older devices and consumes their already degraded battery capacity even faster. At least you can “reduce transparency”, but it actually makes the UI looks less transparent than it was before.
However, my biggest complaint is how half-baked it is. iOS 26 is riddled with bugs. As an example that is ridiculously easy to reproduce: 1) Enable “reduce transparency” in accessibility. 2) Open the Files app to any directory. 3) Enable dark mode. Congratulations, the directory name at the top of the screen is now illegible due to black text on a black background. The same bug is also present in Freeform, except it also makes the status bar illegible. They removed the backing UI element without refactoring the text, and nobody noticed. And unless they didn’t mention it in the release notes, it looks like they still haven’t fixed this in the 26.1 beta.
Damn this is good. It's like playing with oil without having to wash your hands afterwards, and there's no mom chasing to give you a beat for the oil money you've just wasted. And on top of that, it tells you time.
reaching is muscle memory for me. buttons i like because i know what i'm getting, and what i'm getting can be many different things as buttons allow.
I basically only swipe back. This aligns web pages with iOS nav stacks.
I have a deep-seated hatred for Chrome-only devs - not least of which is because it has contributed to the situation we are in, where Google is taking the "my way or the highway" approach to Chrome and adblockers, Android is locking us out of sideloaded apps, etc. Test at least in Chromium and FF as a bare minimum. Submit condescending bug reports to those stupid react components that break entire websites and nobody bothers to check, etc.
Ah…memories…
I am not thrilled with the translucency of Liquid Glass (Apple systems 26).
I'm not sure why they need to use this function, or if it's just not optimized enough to go without it.
(someone continue this with framework x)
but seriously, I'm very interested to hear your gripes with Vue that were solved by react, since the latter feels much worse DX-wise than both Vue or Svelte, notwithstanding worse performance as well.
(You didn't say framework x had to be a different framework than Svelte! x)
But the main issue is the automatic reactivity. It's difficult to reason about and leads to spaghetti code. We also had occasional issues where people would put objects in properties that had some tenuous link to a database object or something, and Vue recursively infects the entire object with getters and setters to make the reactivity work. Sometimes we didn't even notice but it makes everything way slower.
I haven't tried Svelte so I'll take your word for it!
Also this was 3 years ago so I may have misremembered some details. No nitpicking!
I like the idea of svelte but for apps that are small enough that svelte has a bundle size advantage the bundle size difference isn’t decisive (users won’t usually notice or care) and if your app is huge enough that the bundle size is a problem you have problems bigger than your choice of framework.
While I will continue to probably promote Vue where it makes sense, I’m honestly more inclined towards learning Svelte, HTMX, and other less arduous frameworks.
Jokes aside my Pixel 8 Pro handles it just fine as well
Meme-free-zone - here's hoping it stays that way.
Besides, describing a meme is just as good!
Developers especially with tech demos like this, use the latest tech to develop and don't care about supporting older devices. This attitude can sometimes bleed over into their work where they should care for users using older machines, but its expected for a look-at-the-shiny demonstration to other techies using top of the range hardware.
( I am seeing the same laggy effects on an older linux + firefox laptop with integrated graphics, unsurprisingly )
But also, yes, I agree. It didn't need to make a comeback. And even if it did, since iOS and macOS were already fairly translucent, it didn't need to be like this.