Wesley Hilliard:

macOS Tahoe threw an icon on every menu item, making them impossible to distinguish at a glance. macOS Golden Gate has rectified that design taboo with blessedly iconless menus.

Apple:

In macOS 27.0, menu bar and context menus present a reduced set of menu item images, similar to the behavior prior to macOS 26.0. By default, NSMenu hides all menu item symbol images — non-symbol images remain visible. For menu items created from a xib file, NSMenu also observes the value of the “macOS 26.0 only” checkbox in the menu item inspector. If this checkbox is unchecked, the menu item image remains visible; if checked, it is hidden. These changes in menu item image visibility apply to applications linked on macOS 26.0 and later. Review the updated Human Interface Guidelines to determine which menu items in your app should still display images. Use the new preferredImageVisibility property on NSMenuItem to customize the image visibility for your menu items. As in macOS 26.0, NSMenu automatically provides default visible menu item images for certain common system-wide menu items, such as Settings, Share, and Print.

Joachim Kurtz:

„Icons in menus are now hidden by default“ and you can specifically enable them to draw attention to the most important actions.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a great change! But to take a full year and your lead designer leaving to figure out that this was a mistake… woof…

Dominik Wagner:

I like that Menu Icons now are hidden by default again on macOS - Quite a lot of concessions towards liquid glass being the wrong move last year. Takes courage to take so many steps back, literally. I’m appreciating that. Even if they present it as improvements rather than “undo” - that’s just what one has to do for marketing.

Previously:

• macOS Golden Gate 27 Announced
• Icons in Menus Everywhere
• WWDC 2026 Keynote

Wonderful news in MacOS 27 Golden Gate: the icons are gone. It’s like Tahoe’s menu item icons never happened. Prokopov noted it on Mastodon with before and after screenshots, and mentions that Apple has updated the Human Interface Guidelines accordingly[…]

[…]

This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week.

Marcin Wichary:

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.

Cocoa Design Icons Liquid Glass Mac macOS 27 Golden Gate Programming

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