Implement Liquid Glass UI

mrmanafon

So, we all saw the WWDC video yesterday, and while opinions about the second return of Frutiger Aero, or the UX implications of its application by Apple may vary, three things are for sure:

Safari has a new design. In fact Apple's whole HIG is updated.
Apple has shown once again that they are allowed to break HIG.
The UI is universal across devices. osx convergence is closer than ever.

With three in mind, how likely (and how fast) is it that we will get a Liquid Glass Orion? I suppose this will also close a bunch of older tickets regarding inconsistencies in how Safari looks nowadays vs Orion.

What do I see us using? Hmm, I would describe my hopes as:

Have a clear stance on day -96 from Vlad, on whether Orion strives to follow the Safari design, or follow orthodox HIG principles (like it does right now).
Orion team listens to WWDC guidelines, downloads beta SDK and gets ready for the official release of OS26, on time.
We have a beta Orion lying around, to clean up the bugs ahead of the release, and we have an official release of updated UI on day 1 of the New Aero Era™.
All three Orions are ready in time, and share the same look and feel.

JamesW-AU

How much do they have to change, code-wise? Is developing for macOS these days like UIKit where if you're using the API's it mostly "looks right", or do they have to rebuild the UI?

mrmanafon

JamesW-AU No idea whatsoever 😃 but, yes, when it comes to these things, Apple usually claims that a simple rebuild will do most of the heavy lifting. However, me not being a Swift developer, i have no idea - thats why I posted this question, hoping to hear an informed opinion.

One thing that comes to mind is that the Orion team frequently mentions on tickets, that feature XYZ is "quite hard to do and requires a lot of labour", even when it comes to replicating things that Safari already does - meaning its not all as simple as Apple makes it out to be 😃

esiayo

JamesW-AU not much at all tmk if orion is built upon swiftui

Dustin

For reference: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologyoverviews/adopting-liquid-glass

glhrmv

What will this mean for Orion? Will the existing top navigation bar be "floating" above the webpage, rather than sitting firmly on top of and outside of it? What about the vertical tab menu? I don't have the beta so I don't know how Safari is doing it.

mrmanafon

glhrmv I do not know either, as I don't have Tahoe and am on a managed machine that won't get it at least until December 😃

I did see this photo online:

Dustin

Watching some of the lab videos from WWDC it seems that there's a fair amount of flexibility for how developers can implement the new design elements. I guess we'll just have see what they cook up!

mrmanafon

Okay, so Installed Tahoe today and can post some real Safari screenshots.

Home page:

Orion Forums:

Orion Forums scrolled has a WHITE top bar now and it melds in (it was orange before).

With an open address bar popup (or whatever you'd call it)

With some quicksearch results

Sidebar is glass now (and has some buggy animations when doing so). Also notice that they moved the extra icons such as icloud or reading list in here, to the top, below the tab options.

Notice the scroll bars are different!

Here is how it looks with a dark website

And one with kagi search. I purposefully scrolled a bit in order to showcase the translucency of the top bar.

mrmanafon

And here go some iPhone iOS screenshots, taken with a 14.

Homepage

Typing an URL: into the address bar

A website

When scrolled, the address bar minimizes - but its still there

Also notice the blur on the top and bottom

The tabs galllery view is mostly the same, but with glass

The tabs "sidebar"

All the popup menus are also glassy

Anatomy5803

Update Orion's entire UI (toolbar, tabs, sidebar, menus, etc.) to match macOS 26's "Liquid Glass" design language when using macOS 26. This is purely a visual refresh for contemporary aesthetics and OS consistency. There are no workflow changes in that everything works the same but looks and feels native to macOS 26.

This is simply a UI refresh, so a user will use the browser like they normally use, just under the new design language. For an example of a refresh you can see Safari or Safari TP on macOS/iOS/ipadOS/visionOS 26. This feature would make Orion look more native to the OS on macOS 26.

I haven't been able to test if iOS/iPadOS/visionOS's Orion has the updated liquid glass design language, I suspect not but that's speculation.

Anatomy5803

@Dustin I do believe this should be merged with https://orionfeedback.org/d/11282-implement-liquid-glass-ui

elaboratescanner04

Agreed

oplos

I would greatly appreciate an option to activate/deactivate this if a Liquid Glass UI were to be introduced for Orion. I'm not a fan of the aesthetic.

alexjsteffen

I don't know about anyone else, but the recent Orion RC update with initial Liquid Glass support has made it almost unusable. Anyone else having issues?

laiz

alexjsteffen
Hey! The auto updater had some kind of an error which caused Tahoe builds to "update" to macOS14 builds, meaning no LG and some broken UI elements. Are you on the Kagi Discord by any chance? Please ping me there. Alternatively please email me laiz@kagimail.com and I'll send you the correct build.

alexjsteffen

laiz Great. I will do so.

DiljotG564

The tab layout is not using the new Liquid Glass tabs, if you look at Safari, Terminal, etc. in macOS v26, the tabs are using a bubble layout, but Orion is still using the old tab style.

These are the tabs in Safari 26.