After upgrading to 0.99.137-beta today (the upgrading experience is also weird, but it's another issue), I noticed several visual regression of title bar (or is it called toolbar?) when it's showing the website color. I believe that it's mostly caused by the adoption of liquid glass, especially compared to Safari. In the meantime, it looks fine with the default color.
The title bar of Orion 0.99.137-beta:
The title bar of Safari 26:
The issues I noticed:
- All the widgets in the bar have a weird background color, which is ugly and unnecessarily draws the attention.
- The bar is slightly transparent, but the top bar of the website is not, which looks inconsistent.
- When using mini toolbar, the icon size of orion native widgets, such as programmable button (the first one in the tray at the right of the bar) and back/forward button and site settins button (at the left of the bar) is too large, or the icon size of extension is too small.
- The “install as an application” button inside address bar looks lower than the refresh button next to it.
The expectation:
- The widgets should not have the weird background color; instead, look at how Safari renders these visually floating liquid glass widgets without noticable background color, yet still maintaining consistent color and ok-level contrast.
- When the website itself has a bar pinned at the top, the titlebar / toolbar should have the same level of transparency. However, as this is hard to do and the topbar of most websites are not transparent, just making the titlebar / toolbar non-transparent is acceptable. Still, look at how Safari handles this.
- Unify the size and placing of icons. My expectation is that for regular toolbar they are all large and for mini toolbar they are all tiny.
0.99.137-beta, macOS 26.0.1
Tahoe (26)
