Golden Gate beta 6: more unflattening, please

August 18, 2026

Yesterday, Stephen Hackett wrote about changes to the traffic light buttons in macOS Golden Gate beta 6. I think these new buttons are a big improvement, and the change gives me hope that other things could be “unflattened” in future versions of the OS.

At the end of his post, Hackett has a handy set of screenshots showing changes to the traffic lights (as I’ve always called them) through the years. Apple switched to the flat design in 2014 with OS X Yosemite, and I’ve never been a fan. Other than some sizing tweaks, it’s the same design that’s in macOS Tahoe today.

I have a lot of issues with Liquid Glass, particularly on macOS. However, I think that Golden Gate is addressing the vast majority of them. I’d add these new traffic light buttons to that list of improvements. The glass effect adds some dimension and personality. It’s just weird that we’re only seeing them now in beta 6.

This change gives me some (possibly misplaced) hope about another Liquid Glass annoyance: UI flattening. On the whole, I think the glassy effect around some buttons is great, but many other controls in the OS were completely smooshed in Tahoe.

Linking to Hackett’s site again, check out these two settings panels for the TV app. Here it is first in macOS Sequoia and then here’s the version from Tahoe. (I’ve linked to the text on the screenshot page for each OS version. Click the thumbnail above the text to see the full image.) In the Sequoia version, all the controls have borders and depth — including the buttons! In the Tahoe version, everything is flat as a pancake and there’s less contrast overall.

This flatness of the UI hasn’t really been touched in Golden Gate. Apple provides official Figma design files for Golden Gate. If you follow that link, scroll down to the “Preview” section, and choose “Dialogs” from the drop-down at the bottom left, you’ll see something that looks extremely close to what’s shown in the current Tahoe version. The controls and buttons are dull enough to put you to sleep.

Wouldn’t it be great if a future version of macOS had buttons that looked like actual buttons again? Not just the things in toolbars, but buttons like “Save” or “Cancel”? Places you enter text? Checkboxes? If you’re like me, you probably interact with these parts of the OS dozens of times a day. I would much prefer some form of Liquid Glass look for these controls. Wouldn’t that be better than just some small difference in background colour? Maybe we don’t need to go full Aqua (though I wouldn’t complain too much), but I think anything is better than the flatness Tahoe brought with it.

Who knows why these traffic lights changed now. Maybe they’ve been in the queue for a long time. Maybe some new leadership was able to get a last-minute win. Whatever the case, I really hope more UI controls get unflattened in the near future.