A Little Cheesy, but Not Terrible
Published at 07:46 on 21 September 2025
That’s my executive summary of Apple’s new Liquid Glass theme in macOS 26 and iOS 26.
Sure, it was needless make work for Apple’s design department. Sure, it would have probably been better off not to spend all that effort. However, I haven’t run across anything bad overall. I was ready to follow this suggested list of settings tweaks, but quickly realized the default settings were just fine.
The minor changes in the system itself are nothing like the major, revision-to-revision changes in Apple’s mail client. Those were genuinely annoying, and it was hard to turn them all back. There was this persistent trend of using more and more screen real estate to display less and less useful information about each message. At least this is how things were five or six years ago; I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird ever since then.
It is Thunderbird’s lack of frequent, gratuitous design changes which generally makes for a generally better overall user experience. It may look a little dated, but you can see a lot more useful information about the messages in your inbox at a glance. The worst thing about Thunderbird is the message-composition editor, which has always been a little janky when one tries to do anything more than the most basic of HTML formatting, but putting up with that has been a price worth paying for some useful UI stability and density of information presentation.