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IOS OS X Desktops (Apple)

iOS 26.1 Beta 4 Lets Users Control Liquid Glass Transparency With New Toggle (macrumors.com) 25

Posted by BeauHD from the opacity-for-the-people dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: With the fourth betas of iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS 26.1, Apple has introduced a new setting that's designed to allow users to customize the look of Liquid Glass. The toggle lets users select from a clear look for Liquid Glass, or a tinted look. Clear is the current Liquid Glass design, which is more transparent and shows the background underneath buttons, bars, and menus, while tinted increases the opacity of Liquid Glass and adds more contrast.

Apple says that the new toggle was added because during the beta testing period over the summer, user feedback suggested that some people would prefer to have a more opaque option for Liquid Glass. The added setting provides additional customization in iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS Tahoe 26.1. Increasing opacity and adding contrast applies to Liquid Glass throughout the operating system, including in apps and Lock Screen notifications.

iOS 26.1 Beta 4 Lets Users Control Liquid Glass Transparency With New Toggle More | Reply

iOS 26.1 Beta 4 Lets Users Control Liquid Glass Transparency With New Toggle

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  • thank you (Score:3)

    by XaXXon ( 202882 ) <xaxxon.gmail@com> on Monday October 20, 2025 @08:27PM (#65739604) Homepage

    I really don't like the current setup

  • It isn't just the transparent look that makes this Apple's Vista, but everything also loads noticeably slower. Choosing a section in the System Settings now feels like loading a webpage... between the lag of showing the section after a click and how the icons on the section load one by one.

    I've been a Mac user on and off for 20 years, this is the first time in a while I'm seriously thinking about jumping ship. This is the largest miss by Apple in a long time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      It isn't just the transparent look that makes this Apple's Vista, but everything also loads noticeably slower.

      And icons that aren't as recognizable, and black text on a dark grey background, where unless the brightness is all the way up, the average person can't read it, and...

      The number of things Apple did wrong in this design is so staggering that nothing short of setting fire to it will fix the problem. Someone designed it to be pretty with apparently absolutely no thought given to making it actually be readable or usable.

      If this were the first time Apple had done something like this, it would be bad, but Apple

    • I notice a big slowdown from Android 11 to 12. They don't program like they used to. Imagine the flabbergasted eye rolling from the old assembly programmers from the 80s and 90s?

  • Some people? (Score:5, Informative)

    by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Monday October 20, 2025 @08:47PM (#65739634) Homepage

    > ...during the beta testing period over the summer, user feedback suggested that some people would prefer to have a more opaque option for Liquid Glass.

    It is possible and likely that most users prefer the opaque option. Particularly when you show them text getting rendered on top of text. You really do not want transparency in such cases. Transparency is lunacy in UI design. It may look "cool" in some controlled demos. But otherwise looks like a hot mess.

    I remember in the early 2000s seeing some Linux terminals that implemented it. The cool factor lasted all of 5 seconds for me because readability was shit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      It does have a few minor use cases if for example you want to do something in a large window while keeping an eye on another one underneath, but yeah, generally its more annoying that useful. Windows did it for a long time too, think it was 8 that finally binned it but not 100% on that.

    • Transparency is still cool, but only when used on elements which can be transparent without screwing everything up.

      I used to use Compiz with Emerald as the decorator and a liquid glass theme. But I didn't make window contents transparent, I only made title bars (and other decorations) translucent. The text and its drop shadow were fully opaque, same for the widgets, so it didn't create any readability problems whatsoever. But it did look neato.

      Transparency isn't the problem, overdoing it is the problem.

  • Cool, but does it fix all the issues Iâ(TM)m having with Bluetooth ever since updating?

  • ... negligees.

  • Just tried this out (Score:3)

    by GrahamJ ( 241784 ) on Monday October 20, 2025 @10:38PM (#65739780)

    It's definitely much better. I've been using Reduce Motion which also, for some reason, increases blur and opacity on the glass, and this is similar but without the jarring animation reduction. Not sure why it's a switch instead of a slider but I'll take it.

    imo if content is behind something else and I can't interact with it then I don't need to see it.

  • Sick of all the BS that Apple does with its UI and UX.
    I spend ages every update turning all of the wank features off.

    My iPhone is a tool, not a fashion statement

    Yeah I am still on an iPhone 11, it works, does everything I need, and I have zero need for a hardware upgrade, nor IOS 26 upgrade.

  • Who names this shit?

  • Sorry if this sounds rather despondent, but ....

    What is wrong with people? Users have become so accustomed to "eat what the big company provides for you" that being allowed to tweak some little thing is suddenly *news* !?

    Yeah. I know. I totally forgot to drink the kool-aid...

    • I just figured out how to widen my scroll bars (or how I like to put it, return them to how they were before someone messed it up). To borrow an AI slogan, it changes everything. Every task is easier. Now if that happened for a whole bunch of people at once, no matter how geeky, that's something isn't it? Well on the other hand maybe not to those that if something doesn't work right they go under the hood and fix it.

  • They introduce a feature that excites the designers but makes it harder to use, then have to tone it down to make it usable again. I'd hoped that this sort of thing would stop with the departure of thinness-fetishist Jonathan Ive ("you can put your macbook air in a large envelope because it's thin at the edges"), but apparently not.

  • I've been using iOS 26 for three weeks now, and Apple still hasn't fixed the issue where the Find My app crashes on launch.

    I even called Apple tech support about this, and had them open a bug report on it. What's taking so long? The UI changes don't really bother me, but not being able to use my AirTags to track things does.

  • What a time to be alive.
  • Anyone remember Enlightenment or all of the window managers that had these types of features decades ago? When this is your 'big selling feature' you know a phone is now just a commodity.

    - Death to material design.
  • Should have been in since the first IOS 26 . Color transparency is just a mask. Anyway, I canâ(TM)t believe Apple, with so much money and so many employees, is unable to make new products.
  • You can already turn off the transparency by going to settings, accessibility, display & text size, reduce transparency. I did it immediately after upgrading to 26 and that made it much better.

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