I wanted to be outraged at apple, but I really can't. Read WinAPI documentation and try to count all "reserved" parameters for example. OS developers build features just for internal use all the time.

Granted, this is just UI tweak so I'm not convinced it has to be private, but they probably just don't want to have to maintain that forever.

Wait so are all non-standard CSS attributes "anticompetitive"? This seems like wild hyperbole.

Is Google's "-webkit-tap-highlight-color" also anticompetitive? Should we ban the current practice of shipping proprietary CSS attributes while sometimes also proposing them for standardization?

It's just really hard for me to read that as a legit complaint.

Not sure it is "plainly anticompetitive" in the legal sense. In the US, the laws on anti-competitive practices are the Sherman Act and the Clayton act. To be anticompetitive, the courts use the "per se" rule and the "rule of reason". "per se" rule covers things which are specifically listed in the laws as being anticompetitive (eg price fixing).

This isn't in the list of per se anticompetitive practises so it would need to be covered by the "rule of reason". That would require someone to demonstrate actual harm to competition that flowed directly from the illegal nature of the practise and was not compensated by some offsetting procompetitive benefit and there is no less restrictive alternative.

I don't see how a CSS property would meet the standard of actual harm to competition, especially since noone is stopping you from making your own liquid glass css if you want to (as far as I can see).

But there's no evidence yet that it's being used by first-party programs, e.g. by GarageBand or Pages or Mail.app.

It's also quite likely that it's a) not being used at all, and the private API is just for internal testing until it's ready to be made public, and/or b) used by certain OS components that aren't competing with third-party apps (e.g. somewhere in the Settings panel).

And while I agree with your assertion in theory, some cosmetic styling is probably about the least important, most trivial example you could come up with... can't really get myself worked up about this one.

Only if you consider making UI text unreadable an advantage.

What are your thoughts on computer hardware which is much more restrictive? Video game consoles, for example, require all code to be cryptographically signed, meaning that third parties can't publish any software whatsoever without the blessing of the console manufacturer.

I think there is line that a company can cross: using a locked-down appearance setting to make an app look like it is from the company.

For example, if there was a glowing light on the edge of the phone that only lights up with stock apps and company apps, and that signfies for security that an app belongs to a company, that is ok.

I don't consider design/appearance to be a feature. YMD.

True, this is killing innovation in badly written settings panes implemented with web technologies.

this comment is bringing out the apple blinders in force and i love it. do people really see apple as "the good guy"? tech has zero good guys left

Shouldn’t this be easily available in Electron/Tauri and React Native apps?

Based on other Chrome threads here, we do need to make sure that Apple maintains their exclusive monopoly on browser on iOS to prevent these things from happening. Right? Right?! :P

Its a toss up between anticompetitive being bad and unified standards being good.

Look at the m3/4 macs they are insane machines because even the hardware is unified.

How does this give an advantage?

How is Apple withholding Samsung from making applications for Android? What kind of textbooks are you reading?

Isn't the article saying they added a new css element, but it's not restricted to apple apps only really, just not in documentation yet? for example, this article is preview documentation, of a sort?

With whom is Apple competing on their own web pages and apps? And how much advantage does some shiny reflection (which, btw, could also be attained by writing the effect yourself) offer them over that competition? It must be something big and obvious, otherwise there's no way it's illegal, but I can't think of it.

If you mean "anti-competitive" without referring to monopolies, then, well, every company does that.

I think another split is between:

- people who have gone down the webview path, and know how difficult it is to do well

- people who have been told they can simply package their webapp into a native application

You can probably guess which group has more people

I'll concede if you can name one webview that is integrated seamlessly. Maybe the average person wouldn't realise but I think we'd have seen lots of articles about it here. It would be a standard rebuttal to every webview debate, "but Foo is implemented as a webview so it can be done".

Which is probably exactly why this was added. The cheap way to usually tell if someone is using a 3rd party UI toolkit, is to start tweaking the system theming and see if the application follows some scaling/color changes correctly.

In this case some subset of apple provided apps weren't following the theme and they fixed it by adding a private css property.

Vs some other OS vendor that likely removed most of the theme controls so they didn't have to keep fixing a huge pile of 1/2 baked abandoned toolkits scattered across their product portfolio.

There's also, in there somewhere, a corollary about how you don't notice the webviews which don't stick out but just don't feel right. Like, someone mentioned Settings app in MacOS might use them because the icons don't load fast enough.

I can't help but lament just a little bit. Apple used to be about insane polish. Just think about the mentality that created the rounded screen corners on the original Mac. That's just crazy and I admire it.

"All toupées look fake. I've never seen one that I couldn't tell was fake."

I often suspect things in Settings, esp. account/iCloud section to be webviews, just based on how they load (icons appearing a short moment after the page opens for example).

The App Store app seems to be using web views extensively.

Both Mail and Calendar use web views for starters.

I’m sure there are many apps like the Apple Store app and parts of the App Store that pull in web views. That’s most likely what this is for. Probably parts of News, Music, Games apps as well.

I assume they're going to use it on Apple.com, the same way that they were using backdrop-filter to simulate the frosted glass on earlier iOSes

I’m fairly certain Apple Music makes pretty heavy use of webviews.

I like the glass effects and aesthetics, but I think the functionality in a lot of the apps isn't as good as it was. A lot of things that were easy-to-reach buttons are now tucked away in menus, and harder to find.

> Apple's new glass UI seems to draw a lot of ire

Some of it is because of looks, but the overwhelming majority of criticism is due to bugs and legibility and accessibility issues. Liquid Glass is at best half-baked, especially on macOS. It got tweaked so much from their WWDC presentation, you can tell it was rushed and no one really thought it through.

As a short example, go into System Settings, do a search, then scroll the view and look at the search bar. Or go into a folder, scroll it, and watch the contents screw with the title.

> Normies will love it.

Here’s a sample of one hating it.

https://www.threads.com/@chrispirillo/post/DOpUPrIiYdX

> I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text

The bar is high

My suspicion is that genpop is not going to like it, broadly, mostly because the only people who seem to think that operating systems should have "personality" are techies. People just don't think like that; most people view these systems as means to an end, and anything that isn't in service to that is, at best, simply an interesting diversion for the first few days.

One thing I dislike the most about liquid glass is the new bottom tab bar that's been inserted into every first-party app. Apple Music got it the worst. There's now an additional click required to "move" between the Search interface and the remaining four tabs (Home, New, Radio, Library). When you click on Search, you need to click the the Search Box again to get a keyboard. All of these interactions have extremely sophisticated and slow animations; e.g. when on Home, clicking on Library slides a bubble across the tab bar that blows up beyond the tab bar itself, reflecting the intermediate tabs and underlying content, in a way that is tremendously distracting and serves no purpose. Neither Reduce Transparency nor Reduce Motion have any impact on these animations, on the latest release.

In fact, many of Apple's first party apps appear to have forgotten that Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion even exist as accessibility options, or at best have half-assed their implementation. For example, with Reduce Motion enabled, clicking on an album in Apple Music deploys a much more subtle animation (good); clicking the back button uses that same subtle animation (good); but swiping back from the left uses the flowery, unnecessary animation that you'd get with Reduce Motion off. Apple Podcasts has the same problem. iMessage, as far as I can tell, totally disregards the Reduce Motion setting and does nothing different, and implements the Reduce Transparency setting not by softening the transparency as other apps do, but instead underlaying a #000000 black background on every item that did have transparency. There's dozens of examples all across iOS, and we're quite literally days from release; dropdowns such as the Apple Notes or Apple News hamburger [...] menu should animate less under Reduce Motion, but don't; when buttons are disabled on the keyboard, such as Apple News -> Search -> empty search box, the Enter button is greyed out in the wrong, barely legible color, only when Reduce Transparency is enabled, the list goes on.

Count me in the "I think this look is horrendous!" crowd, along with the "What were you thinking, Apple?!?!" crowd.

It's just terrible.

Love or hate liquid glass, the paradigm shift from "UI chrome is a wrapper around app content" to "UI is overlayed on top of app content" seems like the future. It's well aligned with AR and better separates UI layout from content for different screen sizes.

I'm neutral on this first implementation (some good, some bad). But I think the approach will be picked up by essentially everyone. Good news for you, there's nothing saying the overlay UI model has to be transparent. Some will probably be opaque but still floating.

Younger generation is obsessed with nostalgia for Aero/Glass and that whole era's aesthetic. It will definitely become a trend, if not for that then because Apple did it and the industry has lost all innovation outside of "copy whatever Apple does."

I do wish they didn't make it bounce and jiggle so much. It changes the whole thing from looking like glass to looking like a gelatinous blob.

Same boat as you - hope it doesn't but I'm pretty sure it will. Apple is doing it, so other companies will jump on the same bandwagon.

Already has

That would not get through the App Store review process.

thinking of youtube.com/watch?v=NdJ_y1c_j_I ?

> Honestly, why don't they just add it to Safari as a css property?

It's possible that they will in the future, but are still deciding on the API or implementation.

They're both glass-inspired effects. If you really want to know the differences, your best bet is probably the WWDC session "Meet Liquid Glass".

Small demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/-2KaGU8G_vE

Windows 7 did it like 15 years ago

> Create something, that nobody asked for

Their UI team asked for it, to use internally (so far), as part of the latest UI style.

No, what Mac OS X did in like 2001 or so.

No, Windows 7 actually did a glass texture, whereas this is just a blur with marketing.