John Gruber on Daring Fireball:

Perhaps the worst UI crime in MacOS 26 Tahoe was the inexplicable decision to add inscrutable, distracting icons next to every item in the menu bar. You will recall Jim Nielsen writing about it, rightly describing it as exactly the sort of thing that Mac users look down upon in platforms like Google Docs and Windows. You will also recall Nikita “Tonsky” Prokopov writing about it, illustrating that the bad idea wasn’t even implemented well, with different Apple apps using entirely different icons for the same menu items. […]

Top third-party developers rightly rejected the design, adopting open source code from Brent Simmons to disable the default “icons in all standard menu items” behavior. […]

Wonderful news in MacOS 27 Golden Gate: the icons are gone. It’s like Tahoe’s menu item icons never happened.

Kudos to Nielsen and Prokopov for pushing on this and explaining the problem so well. This wasn’t about ugly icons. This was about improper use and misunderstanding of iconography.

(Also may I try to manifest something:) Looking forward to reading the oral history of macOS 26 Tahoe and Liquid Glass some time in the 2030s!