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Comment by postexitus | Hacker News Reader

Just drop the liquid glass farce and you will save 5% battery life already.

ios 27 being ios 26 minus liquid glass is literally the only thing I want from the next ios version.

Same with macOS. I'm sticking with Sequoia, but don't know what to do if macOS 27 turns out to be just as ugly as Tahoe.

I'm sticking with Sonoma as long as they still provide security updates, then i go +1, hoping to skip the whole liquid glass phase.

Just give me my fucking corners back. I paid good money for them.

It's like a new woodworker with a new router where every edge must be rounded. Hopefully, the new will wear off, and everyone will realize round corners do not fit in square holes

Been there done that!

But they do.

I would like them to also fix all the weird rendering bugs they introduced in Safari.

Though maybe those are also liquid glass’ fault.

Chrome has them too :)

Yeah, because chrome is required to use -safari- webkit too, apple won't allow alternative browsers on the app store.

Except in the EU, but they don't allow it globally so no sane company is going to invest time into building a browser for iOS while apple is intentionally region-locking the ability to install them.

So yeah, on iOS, rendering bugs on Chrome are quite often apple's fault, and the Chrome team can't fix em.

Safari is literally unusable on some websites.

So, for example, since the toolbar at the bottom is not a separate interface but hovers over the rendered page, if the page has a button or link that only sits at the bottom of the page, it can literally be impossible to click it because the hovering toolbar will cover it. I’ve come across 2 websites in the past week itself where I had to switch to mobile Firefox to actually do something.

this would make me so happy!

I'd even settle for it being on a switch, call it "minimal UI" or something, but I have a feeling that Apple doesn't work like that. It's burn-the-boats, we're going all in on Glass and there's no going back.

I wonder if anybody at Apple is bold enough to lose face over this, given that there‘s a leadership shuffle underway.

They might manage to pin it all on Alan Dye, who recently jumped ship to Meta.

I thought the person responsible was already gone...

People keep blaming Alan Dye as if he was the only one responsible.

Federighi—who's in charge of implementing this and was busy praising it on stage—is completely blameless. As are all other managers big and small at Apple.

> and was busy praising it on stage

I mean, yeah, if you were picked to present "on stage" (when was the last time a stage was actually involved???) then of course you're going to be a team player and read the script enthusiastically. It's not like Federighi is going to present something "and now, here's the thing that I argued against doing, but was shouted down in all the meetings so here's this thing I don't like and you shouldn't feel obliged to like it either"

> I mean, yeah, if you were picked to present "on stage"

Ah yes. Federighi, the VP of Platform Development, literally responsible for the development of iOS and MacOs "was picked", and had no power to say no to the overwhelming power of the all-powerful head of design Alan Dye.

> but was shouted down in all the meetings

So, VP of Platforms was shouted down by whom exactly?

But sure, let's keep telling everyone that it was only Alan Dye who was responsible for Liquid Glass.

BTW I remind you it was the same Federighi who introduced the awful design changes in the MacOS a few years ago proudly presenting the new settings app and saying that everything will be meticulously designed in the final version (was it Sonoma? Can't remember).

You've taken the wrong interpretation from what I was being somewhat snide about. I don't know the Apple hierarchy and who is actually responsible for what. The point was that anyone presenting for Apple is going to come across as having drunk the kool-aid, otherwise, they would not have been picked.

At the end of the day, I don't care who was/wasn't responsible for any of the decisions. I have no say in the matter, and unless you're part of the management at Apple, neither do you. Lots of people wrote the code to make whatever debacle has happened. They all have skin in the game.

> I don't know the Apple hierarchy and who is actually responsible for what.

Alan Dye was Vice President of Human Interface Design

Federighi is Senior Vice President Software Engineering. Only Tim Cook and God are above him: https://www.apple.com/leadership/craig-federighi/

I mean, you're supposed to know at least some basic facts to engage in a conversation about this, right? He wasn't "picked to present"

> The point was that anyone presenting for Apple is going to come across as having drunk the kool-aid, otherwise, they would not have been picked.

You've missed my point entirely.

Again: it wasn't just Alan Dye reapinsible for Liquid Glass. People keep pretending only Dye was responsible for it.

There's no need to lose face to the vast majority of their customers, who don't read tech blogs or know who Siracusa is.

They can just boldy advance forwarded in a rearward direction and claim whatever they want about it. They've done it multiple times - every new iPhone and iOS has looked "the best and newest" and made the last one that looked the best and newest look old-hat.

> … or know who Siracusa is.

Succinctly put.

You’re right that they’ve done that before. But I only remember Jobs and Ive doing it, and they have a reality distortion field.

They owned their mistake of removing all ports and function keys from MacBook Pros, so there is a chance. That being said, the UI degradation of macOS has been a slow but persistent march for about a decade now, and I don't imagine it will change now.

But what if I want my iPhone to look like Windows Vista?

I actually liked how Vista looked, but it had a lot of artificial sheen that Liquid Glass doesn’t have.

Looks were never Vista’s problem.

I don't remember my Vista installation being this illegible.

Windows 98 Phone when?

I would like nothing more but the goodwill (what little is left) that would be burnt with the developers who updated their apps to use Liquid Glass might be more than Apple can handle.

Best bet and to move as quickly as possible to tone it down, fix the bugs, and get someone who actually likes macOS in charge(clearly the people in charge hate it, why else would they treat it so badly). The System Settings app was the canary in the coal mine (yes, I'm sure there even better canaries but it's the first that comes to mind), whoever let that out the door should have already been reprimanded but instead Apple doubled down and created the trash heap that is Tahoe.

I don't think they can or will change something that drastic right away, but I'd wager that there is at least one team, rethinking it.

Maybe a year or two of bug fixing updates, while they entirely refresh liquid glass?

Seems like a BIG job.

I like this site, and would love to love it. But the unrelenting refusal to participate in new things simply because they're new is incredibly disappointing. There's nothing wrong with Liquid Glass. There's nothing wrong with an llm. Half of this site could just be a bot complaining.

Personally, the icon and widget edges constantly moving around when moving the phone even slightly in any direction got on my nerves so bad that I had to disable Motion completely (the only fix for it). This unfortunately also downgraded a lot of other UI components/interactions as well.

It did give me a battery boost though, so at least there's that.

UX regressions are bad, and liquid glass is worse than Microsoft’s Metro nonsense for usability.

Transparency is not a good user experience when you’re trying to read detailed text.

I don't care when somebody doesn't like aesthetics or look and feel of a new theme. It is subjective. Giving people an option to turn it off is kind. But Liquid Glass is usability terror. Just bring up the onscreen controls when you are playing video and compare that with what it was before. What is incredibly disappointing is people like you who defends new things just because they are new without paying any attention to usability, ergonomics or -sadly- performance. There is nothing good about Liquid Glass. Half of this site could just be a bot complaining.

There's a lot of things wrong with liquid glass. The problem isn't that nobody has valid complaints. It's that you, and others, read those valid complaints and then just literally pretend they don't exist. Frankly, I don't even know how you manage to achieve this level of cognitive dishonesty without stepping back and seriously considering your life and purpose.

Yes, liquid glass does actually have problems. It has performance problems. It can be a big distraction, and some people believe UI whitespace shouldn't detract from the main content. It has huge legibility problems. Sometimes text straight up cannot be read. It has predictability problems. Stuff moves around when it shouldn't, text magically changes colors based on heuristics, which throws users off.

And that's not an exhaustive list.

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