MacOS Tahoe 26.3 Fixes a Few Bugs With ‘Reduce Transparency’ ⇥ eclecticlight.co
What Apple doesn’t reveal is that it has improved, if not fixed, the shortcomings in Accessibility’s Reduced Transparency setting. When that’s enabled, at least some of the visual mess resulting from Liquid Glass, for example in the Search box in System Settings, is now cleaned up, as the sidebar header is now opaque. It’s a small step, but does address one of the most glaring faults in 26.2.
In apps like Messages and Preview, the toolbar finally has a solid background when Reduce Transparency is turned on instead of the translucent gradient previously. The toolbar itself and the buttons within it remain ill-defined, however, unless you also turn on Increase Contrast, which Apple clearly does not want you to do because it makes the system look ridiculous. Also, when Reduce Transparency is turned on, Siri looks like this:
One would assume this is the kind of thing someone at Apple would notice if there were people working there who used Siri, tested Accessibility features, and cared about contrast.
Adam Engst, TidBits:
Two other Liquid Glass-related pecadillos fared less well. First, although Apple fixed a macOS 26.2 problem that caused the column divider handles to be overwritten by scroll bars (first screenshot below), if you hide both the path bar and status bar, an unseemly gap appears between the scroll bar and the handles (fourth screenshot below). Additionally, while toggling the path and status bars, I managed to get the filenames to overwrite the status bar (third screenshot below). Worse, all of these were taken with Reduce Transparency on, so why are filenames ever visible under the scroll bar?
The problem with a cross-platform top-to-bottom redesign that puts translucency at the forefront is that it means addressing each of the ever-increasing number of control conditions. And then you are still stuck with Liquid Glass’ reflective quality. Even with Reduce Transparency turned on, the Dock will brighten — in light mode — when dragging an application window near it, because it is reflecting the large white expanse. Technically, the opacity of the Dock has not changed, but it still carries the perception of a translucent area with the impact it has on its contrast. Apple has written itself a whole new set of bugs to fix.