> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere.
Why must they be using it somewhere? The amount of dead code and features in common software is ridiculous. They might've changed directions 5 times through this, and the CSS property came in #2 and went out of use in #4…
Providing an OS feature only to first-party programs is a plainly anticompetitive practice. Using your privileged position in one market (cell phones/cell phone operating systems) to gain an advantage in another market (smart phone applications) that you withhold from your competitors is a textbook case.
I wanted to be outraged at apple, but I really can't. Read WinAPI documentation and try to count all "reserved" parameters for example. OS developers build features just for internal use all the time.
Granted, this is just UI tweak so I'm not convinced it has to be private, but they probably just don't want to have to maintain that forever.
The key distinction is the withholding from your competitors part. WinAPI may have a ton of features labelled "pls no use thx" but MS doesn't block you from distributing a program that uses them anyway.
Yeah, this seems reasonable to me. The better thing to get annoyed at Apple for is being slow to implement web standards. I guess you could make the argument that they are choosing to work on stuff like this instead, but I think that’s a weak argument.
The better thing to get annoyed at Apple for is being slow to implement web standards.
Now that Safari supports the HTML5 date picker (since iOS 14.1 - five years ago), this is more of a meme than fact-based reasoning. Unless you believe Google including something in Chrome automatically makes it a "standard."
I have a list (unfortunately on a device I can't access now) of web standards that are supported on Safari and Firefox, but not on Chrome. I need it because one web site I work on is 100% Safari users (about 800 people), and another is mostly Android (about 70%). So I need a cheat sheet of which does what.
> Private/secret APIs in Windows were a prominent part of the US and EU antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the 90s/00s.
It mattered because Microsoft had 95% of the operating system market at the time and was using its monopoly position to take over the web, even after signing a decent decree with the US government.
Edit: It can probably be argued that Apple is a acting like a monopolist in one or a few areas though?
The current web monopolist (Google) was coincidentally founded 2 months after the US antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft was decided (july - september 1998).
Similarly meh results with US vs Google two weeks ago.
> It can probably be argued that Apple is a acting like a monopolist in one or a few areas though?
I don't think that's a credible argument. Apple, at best, has about 55% smartphone marketshare in the United States--and significantly less in most other countries.
Remember, having a monopoly isn't itself illegal; it's using the monopoly to disadvantage competitors, especially in emerging markets, which was what the Microsoft case was all about.
I don't think there's a legal justification for suggesting that Apple creating a private feature only they can use--for now--gives them unfair advantage in the market.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple makes it a public feature in a future release of iOS 26.
Wait so are all non-standard CSS attributes "anticompetitive"? This seems like wild hyperbole.
Is Google's "-webkit-tap-highlight-color" also anticompetitive? Should we ban the current practice of shipping proprietary CSS attributes while sometimes also proposing them for standardization?
It's just really hard for me to read that as a legit complaint.
So when Google creates self-serving APIs in a web browser engine, it's anti-consumer and is killing the free web.
But when Apple creates self-serving APIs in a web browser engine, it's just another private entitlement, a red herring and their right as the proprietor of Safari.
The difference is that Google is by far in a much more dominant position and every dev who leverages Chrome-specific APIs further entrenches that dominance. In the browser space, Apple is the long-trailing runner-up and has far less impact.
It appears that this particular API is restricted to embedded webviews, too (doesn’t work in Safari), so it has no bearing on the open web, unlike APIs such as WebUSB in Chrome.
Do you have any evidence of this claim? It's possible that neither Apple or third party developers are able to ship apps through the app store with it.
You can use `-webkit-tap-highlight-color` on your website or PWA and distribute it any way you want. It will just not work in non-webkit browsers like Firefox.
What apple does and what the article talks about: They have a CSS property that ONLY they can use, you can't put that in your PWA, it won't work (no matter the browser).
Based on other Chrome threads here, we do need to make sure that Apple maintains their exclusive monopoly on browser on iOS to prevent these things from happening. Right? Right?! :P
With whom is Apple competing on their own web pages and apps? And how much advantage does some shiny reflection (which, btw, could also be attained by writing the effect yourself) offer them over that competition? It must be something big and obvious, otherwise there's no way it's illegal, but I can't think of it.
If you mean "anti-competitive" without referring to monopolies, then, well, every company does that.
Google or any open source map product. And actually, if we use the SCOTUS approved DOJ v MSFT consent decree as precedent, any app that can't use this private API component would be an impacted party.
I'm an antitrust nerd - 20+ years since I made my first PACER account as a teenager to get documents from interesting cases..
95% of what people call "anticompetitive" or "monopolistic" has no legal bearing. People don't know the legal definition of those words and bandy them about based on vibes.
This however, is a very very clear case of violations of precedent. If we look at Microsoft's final judgement https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-133 see F(1)(a), H(2)(b), while these stipulations haven't been applied to Apple, if I were in a market dominant position, I'd be super careful about capricious restrictions like the example undocumented API, and behavior that mimics patterns of activity that were seen as actionably sanctionable to similar market dominant forces
> With whom is Apple competing on their own web pages and apps?
With every other app using a web view.
> without referring to monopolies
Of course it’s about monopolies. Safari is still “privileged” to be forced default browser. Making an alternative, Apple ensured to be very hard and expensive. So gating any kind of first party feature is a big no.
It’s a way they can make their webview-based apps look “native” more easily than a third party can. If you try out a third-party app and it looks less well integrated visually than a similar first-party app, then the latter has a competitive advantage because of that.
What are your thoughts on computer hardware which is much more restrictive? Video game consoles, for example, require all code to be cryptographically signed, meaning that third parties can't publish any software whatsoever without the blessing of the console manufacturer.
I'm generally opposed to that as well. Agreeing with Muromec's reply, I don't think it is necessarily anticompetitive in the case where the console vendor doesn't favor its first party games, but of course all three do that in practice. The situation is somewhat mitigated by the existence of a flourishing open market alternative (PC games).
More broadly, and not based on antitrust grounds but on property rights grounds, I am opposed to every kind of DRM. First, it should be legal to circumvent any and all DRM/anti-copying measures. Second, it should be illegal to deprive the next owner of their property rights so that you can exert ownership control over a product past its sale.
If I buy a computer, do nothing but install a keylogging rootkit on it, and sell it on to someone else, I would rightly risk jail time. "The malware is part of the product" is not a valid excuse. DRM is also malware. It should be prosecuted as such, and if existing legislation is found wanting, more specific laws need to be written.
>It all comes down to "the vendor can do things with your computer you can't do yourself" in the end.
It's not even that. A console vendor that locks down everything behind the TPM helps to not deal with cheaters is arguably fine. A console vendor that is also a game develop and caps the FPS of all games that aren't their own is abusing their monopoly position in one market to gain unfair advantage on a different market.
I think there is line that a company can cross: using a locked-down appearance setting to make an app look like it is from the company.
For example, if there was a glowing light on the edge of the phone that only lights up with stock apps and company apps, and that signfies for security that an app belongs to a company, that is ok.
I don't consider design/appearance to be a feature. YMD.
Isn't the article saying they added a new css element, but it's not restricted to apple apps only really, just not in documentation yet? for example, this article is preview documentation, of a sort?
No, it says it is restricted. You need to set a private attribute on the webview to enable it. And if you interact with private APIs your app will be rejected in review.
Which is probably exactly why this was added. The cheap way to usually tell if someone is using a 3rd party UI toolkit, is to start tweaking the system theming and see if the application follows some scaling/color changes correctly.
In this case some subset of apple provided apps weren't following the theme and they fixed it by adding a private css property.
Vs some other OS vendor that likely removed most of the theme controls so they didn't have to keep fixing a huge pile of 1/2 baked abandoned toolkits scattered across their product portfolio.
Thanks! I'm hoping to continue down this path and write up some thoughts on how you might actually achieve seamless in-app webviews at some point but, y'know... time.
In the meantime (hey, it's already a thread of self-promotion) my last writeup was about the native views WKWebView generates when you use hardware accelerated CSS transforms:
There's also, in there somewhere, a corollary about how you don't notice the webviews which don't stick out but just don't feel right. Like, someone mentioned Settings app in MacOS might use them because the icons don't load fast enough.
I can't help but lament just a little bit. Apple used to be about insane polish. Just think about the mentality that created the rounded screen corners on the original Mac. That's just crazy and I admire it.
No kidding. I grew up loving Macs in general, but despite some people's rose-tinted views of classic macOS in the 80's and 90's, I always had uncontrollable pangs of stabbiness every time I had to do anything in the cluttered, clunky, and tiny interface of Chooser.
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere. The fact that none of us have noticed exactly where suggests that we're interacting with webviews in our daily use of iOS without ever even realising it.
This is what stood out to me. I've never really suspected webviews and can't think of a place now.
I often suspect things in Settings, esp. account/iCloud section to be webviews, just based on how they load (icons appearing a short moment after the page opens for example).
When you tap some of the menu items in the “Saved to iCloud” section, they don’t have the normal grey item highlight that happens with the rest of the settings app.
Actually it does not. It used to, but then was rewritten. The Accessibility Inspector app can be used to see what's the class of the UI elements, if you want to check.
I’m sure there are many apps like the Apple Store app and parts of the App Store that pull in web views. That’s most likely what this is for. Probably parts of News, Music, Games apps as well.
Honestly, why don't they just add it to Safari as a css property?
I'm confident we'll have a ton of websites trying to replicate the Liquid Glass aesthetic, and will do so in a way that will eat half your laptops CPU.
As the article notes, with this in CSS, it's extremely easy to have different CSS depending on whether this is available or not. At the same time, it's not like other browsers don't do "non-standard" things.
I'm not saying I love Liquid Glass and I want it everywhere, but I prefer to have proper Liquid Glass everywhere on Safari, over having a custom unoptimized laggy unpolished version of it.
Apple's new glass UI seems to draw a lot of ire, but I... kinda like it? It feels like the OS has some actual personality again instead of just being flat and boring. I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text again. I view it as a welcome change. It's not just "nostalgia" either. It has actual utility.
I installed the iOS 26 Beta to test some things on the websites I maintain in advance of it going public, and while there are some issues here and there I think the overall direction to add more personality back into the OS is a good one. Normies will love it.
I like the glass effects and aesthetics, but I think the functionality in a lot of the apps isn't as good as it was. A lot of things that were easy-to-reach buttons are now tucked away in menus, and harder to find.
Interesting, using webviews is a common shortcut for a lot of functionality, and even native apps will occasionally have some webviews (that you might not even notice) out of convenience (and sometimes necessity).
Apple themselves run into these exact cases and develop a compromise for themselves, while at the same time telling third party developers that aren't allowed to use the exact same compromise, and they MUST use Apple's native UI if they want liquid glass...
Love or hate liquid glass, the paradigm shift from "UI chrome is a wrapper around app content" to "UI is overlayed on top of app content" seems like the future. It's well aligned with AR and better separates UI layout from content for different screen sizes.
I'm neutral on this first implementation (some good, some bad). But I think the approach will be picked up by essentially everyone. Good news for you, there's nothing saying the overlay UI model has to be transparent. Some will probably be opaque but still floating.
VR is still aspirational, but we already have AR making baby steps into everything. Every time you see a QR code for the menu burned into a restaurant table, you're looking at a sort of AR: the phone sees it differently than you. Then there's games, but that seems to be largely a passing fad, like 3D TV.
I know, it barely qualifies as AR... but while I love watching the bleeding edge of tech, I'm glad overall that we're slow-rolling this kind of thing.
Please, please cite sources for this. Without context you are really just drawing conjecture here.
Apple certainly seems invested in the idea of an AR future. But users do not - ARkit integrations are few-and-far between, Pokemon Go is a dead fad and Vision Pro failed harder than almost any other contemporary Apple product. It seems less like Apple is skating to the puck, and more like they're begging someone to pass to them. But the rest of the industry seems content ignoring the AR industry to invest away from Apple into stocks like Nvidia. Simultaneously, Apple threw away their stake in consortiums like Khronos, signalling a lack of desire to engage in new software standards.
With how many roadblocks Apple is facing here, I have no idea how you'd conclude that forcing AR on their users is a preferred paradigm.
Younger generation is obsessed with nostalgia for Aero/Glass and that whole era's aesthetic. It will definitely become a trend, if not for that then because Apple did it and the industry has lost all innovation outside of "copy whatever Apple does."
As a fan of aero, I hope Google copies the Apple theme with their own aero theme.
There are some places where I hope Apple improves things like legibility and contrast, but I'll take anything over the bland, flat designs of the Window 8 era.
> you have to toggle a setting in WKPreferences called useSystemAppearance... and it's private. So if you use it, say goodbye to App Store approval.
is this true? i know very little of iOS development but i swear i remember watching a decompilation of an app that used various internal APIs to provide animated home screen widgets
> the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly.
My guess would be that the App Store apps on iOS and macOS and the Music app rely on these seamless web views for a lot of their dynamic layout content.
> Whoever it was at Apple that decided to make this a CSS property is a genius because it makes it incredibly easy to provide different rules based on Liquid Glass support
What is genius here? Create something, that nobody asked for, create an in-house CSS property to use across approved apps. Genius? I would simply call this a dirty trick.
There are a lot of things, that they could have implemented, according to the CSS spec. But they decided to spend workforce on this shit. Yeah, they are a business and free to do whatever they want with their money. But I don’t like their choices.
> the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly
very true, and why I got out of mobile app development when I noticed like a decade ago, scrubbed my whole resume of it to switch to other kinds of dev
I'm surprised there is still demand for that though, but I've found other solutions to be good enough, when a phone is involved
Windows 7 built a design language around it, transparency was never the main attraction.
Which is smart. Contrast is king, especially on consumer hardware where grandma might not see too well in her late age. It wasn't the glass effects of Vista or Yosemite that appealed to people, it was the high-contrast UI elements and skeuomorphic design elements (neither of which are present in liquid glass).
> But my suggestion is this: the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly.
Integration is one thing.
The more important thing is resource consumption: Steam for example always gulps 300MB of my precious RAM for two Webview processes that aren't needed anywhere - and earlier versions actually offered a flag to disable the webviews from getting started. On Android, apps using WebView routinely means that either all other apps get OOM'd or in the worst case, the app itself gets OOM'd from its own web view with very weird side effects when whatever the webview was used for is done.
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere.
Why must they be using it somewhere? The amount of dead code and features in common software is ridiculous. They might've changed directions 5 times through this, and the CSS property came in #2 and went out of use in #4…
Providing an OS feature only to first-party programs is a plainly anticompetitive practice. Using your privileged position in one market (cell phones/cell phone operating systems) to gain an advantage in another market (smart phone applications) that you withhold from your competitors is a textbook case.
I wanted to be outraged at apple, but I really can't. Read WinAPI documentation and try to count all "reserved" parameters for example. OS developers build features just for internal use all the time.
Granted, this is just UI tweak so I'm not convinced it has to be private, but they probably just don't want to have to maintain that forever.
The key distinction is the withholding from your competitors part. WinAPI may have a ton of features labelled "pls no use thx" but MS doesn't block you from distributing a program that uses them anyway.
That used to be true but they absolutely do this today :(
Spent so much time trying to repro some functionality only to realize that Windows has an allow list for what apps it listens to for certain APIs.
Yeah, this seems reasonable to me. The better thing to get annoyed at Apple for is being slow to implement web standards. I guess you could make the argument that they are choosing to work on stuff like this instead, but I think that’s a weak argument.
The better thing to get annoyed at Apple for is being slow to implement web standards.
Now that Safari supports the HTML5 date picker (since iOS 14.1 - five years ago), this is more of a meme than fact-based reasoning. Unless you believe Google including something in Chrome automatically makes it a "standard."
I have a list (unfortunately on a device I can't access now) of web standards that are supported on Safari and Firefox, but not on Chrome. I need it because one web site I work on is 100% Safari users (about 800 people), and another is mostly Android (about 70%). So I need a cheat sheet of which does what.
Private/secret APIs in DOS/Windows were a prominent part of the US and EU antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the 90s/00s.
> Private/secret APIs in Windows were a prominent part of the US and EU antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the 90s/00s.
It mattered because Microsoft had 95% of the operating system market at the time and was using its monopoly position to take over the web, even after signing a decent decree with the US government.
Edit: It can probably be argued that Apple is a acting like a monopolist in one or a few areas though?
The current web monopolist (Google) was coincidentally founded 2 months after the US antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft was decided (july - september 1998).
Similarly meh results with US vs Google two weeks ago.
> It can probably be argued that Apple is a acting like a monopolist in one or a few areas though?
I don't think that's a credible argument. Apple, at best, has about 55% smartphone marketshare in the United States--and significantly less in most other countries.
Remember, having a monopoly isn't itself illegal; it's using the monopoly to disadvantage competitors, especially in emerging markets, which was what the Microsoft case was all about.
I don't think there's a legal justification for suggesting that Apple creating a private feature only they can use--for now--gives them unfair advantage in the market.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple makes it a public feature in a future release of iOS 26.
Microsoft doesn't punish you for using those though.
Wait so are all non-standard CSS attributes "anticompetitive"? This seems like wild hyperbole.
Is Google's "-webkit-tap-highlight-color" also anticompetitive? Should we ban the current practice of shipping proprietary CSS attributes while sometimes also proposing them for standardization?
It's just really hard for me to read that as a legit complaint.
If you use this CSS liquid glass effect in your app, Apple will reject it from the App Store.
If Apple uses this CSS liquid glass effect in their apps, it'll pass App Store review just fine.
Do you see the issue now?
iOS has many private APIs, this one is no different. The fact it's implemented in WebKit is a red herring.
you failed to address the point of the comment you replied to.
So when Google creates self-serving APIs in a web browser engine, it's anti-consumer and is killing the free web.
But when Apple creates self-serving APIs in a web browser engine, it's just another private entitlement, a red herring and their right as the proprietor of Safari.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The difference is that Google is by far in a much more dominant position and every dev who leverages Chrome-specific APIs further entrenches that dominance. In the browser space, Apple is the long-trailing runner-up and has far less impact.
It appears that this particular API is restricted to embedded webviews, too (doesn’t work in Safari), so it has no bearing on the open web, unlike APIs such as WebUSB in Chrome.
>it'll pass App Store review just fine.
Do you have any evidence of this claim? It's possible that neither Apple or third party developers are able to ship apps through the app store with it.
Why would Apple go through the App Store review process for their first-party apps?
Because it's cheaper to maintain 1 ingestion pipeline than 2.
If you use this CSS liquid glass effect in your app, Apple will reject it from the App Store.
Citation needed.
The blog article speculates this, but there is no proof.
You can use `-webkit-tap-highlight-color` on your website or PWA and distribute it any way you want. It will just not work in non-webkit browsers like Firefox.
What apple does and what the article talks about: They have a CSS property that ONLY they can use, you can't put that in your PWA, it won't work (no matter the browser).
Bad example since "-webkit-tap-highlight-color" is initially from Apple, not Google
[flagged]
I can install chrome on Windows, Linux and Mac, so I give them a pass. Not to mention that was ancient history.
this comment is bringing out the apple blinders in force and i love it. do people really see apple as "the good guy"? tech has zero good guys left
Based on other Chrome threads here, we do need to make sure that Apple maintains their exclusive monopoly on browser on iOS to prevent these things from happening. Right? Right?! :P
With whom is Apple competing on their own web pages and apps? And how much advantage does some shiny reflection (which, btw, could also be attained by writing the effect yourself) offer them over that competition? It must be something big and obvious, otherwise there's no way it's illegal, but I can't think of it.
If you mean "anti-competitive" without referring to monopolies, then, well, every company does that.
Google or any open source map product. And actually, if we use the SCOTUS approved DOJ v MSFT consent decree as precedent, any app that can't use this private API component would be an impacted party.
I'm an antitrust nerd - 20+ years since I made my first PACER account as a teenager to get documents from interesting cases..
95% of what people call "anticompetitive" or "monopolistic" has no legal bearing. People don't know the legal definition of those words and bandy them about based on vibes.
This however, is a very very clear case of violations of precedent. If we look at Microsoft's final judgement https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-133 see F(1)(a), H(2)(b), while these stipulations haven't been applied to Apple, if I were in a market dominant position, I'd be super careful about capricious restrictions like the example undocumented API, and behavior that mimics patterns of activity that were seen as actionably sanctionable to similar market dominant forces
> With whom is Apple competing on their own web pages and apps?
With every other app using a web view.
> without referring to monopolies
Of course it’s about monopolies. Safari is still “privileged” to be forced default browser. Making an alternative, Apple ensured to be very hard and expensive. So gating any kind of first party feature is a big no.
It’s a way they can make their webview-based apps look “native” more easily than a third party can. If you try out a third-party app and it looks less well integrated visually than a similar first-party app, then the latter has a competitive advantage because of that.
Only if you consider making UI text unreadable an advantage.
I don't think it's an improvement, but having a GUI that matches user expectations is undeniably a business advantage.
What are your thoughts on computer hardware which is much more restrictive? Video game consoles, for example, require all code to be cryptographically signed, meaning that third parties can't publish any software whatsoever without the blessing of the console manufacturer.
I'm generally opposed to that as well. Agreeing with Muromec's reply, I don't think it is necessarily anticompetitive in the case where the console vendor doesn't favor its first party games, but of course all three do that in practice. The situation is somewhat mitigated by the existence of a flourishing open market alternative (PC games).
More broadly, and not based on antitrust grounds but on property rights grounds, I am opposed to every kind of DRM. First, it should be legal to circumvent any and all DRM/anti-copying measures. Second, it should be illegal to deprive the next owner of their property rights so that you can exert ownership control over a product past its sale.
If I buy a computer, do nothing but install a keylogging rootkit on it, and sell it on to someone else, I would rightly risk jail time. "The malware is part of the product" is not a valid excuse. DRM is also malware. It should be prosecuted as such, and if existing legislation is found wanting, more specific laws need to be written.
I'm assuming they don't like that either.
Apple does plenty of bad things, and many are worse than this, but it doesn't mean it's not fair to point out this one is bad, too.
It all comes down to "the vendor can do things with your computer you can't do yourself" in the end.
>It all comes down to "the vendor can do things with your computer you can't do yourself" in the end.
It's not even that. A console vendor that locks down everything behind the TPM helps to not deal with cheaters is arguably fine. A console vendor that is also a game develop and caps the FPS of all games that aren't their own is abusing their monopoly position in one market to gain unfair advantage on a different market.
I think there is line that a company can cross: using a locked-down appearance setting to make an app look like it is from the company.
For example, if there was a glowing light on the edge of the phone that only lights up with stock apps and company apps, and that signfies for security that an app belongs to a company, that is ok.
I don't consider design/appearance to be a feature. YMD.
Isn't the article saying they added a new css element, but it's not restricted to apple apps only really, just not in documentation yet? for example, this article is preview documentation, of a sort?
No, it says it is restricted. You need to set a private attribute on the webview to enable it. And if you interact with private APIs your app will be rejected in review.
I understand, though conjecture (worked at apple for years) this looks like an imminent "feature" that will become documented.
True, this is killing innovation in badly written settings panes implemented with web technologies.
How does this give an advantage?
How is Apple withholding Samsung from making applications for Android? What kind of textbooks are you reading?
Shouldn’t this be easily available in Electron/Tauri and React Native apps?
Electron doesn't use WebKit, so definitely not. Not sure about Tauri desktop, but how would you use it for Tauri mobile and React Native?
Woah, TIL. Chromium apparently forked WebKit in 2013. wtf?
So, if you wanted webviews that could leverage this you’d basically need a native swift app with webviews to get access.
I like "Alastair's Grand Theory of In-App Webviews":
the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly
I think another split is between:
- people who have gone down the webview path, and know how difficult it is to do well
- people who have been told they can simply package their webapp into a native application
You can probably guess which group has more people
Which is probably exactly why this was added. The cheap way to usually tell if someone is using a 3rd party UI toolkit, is to start tweaking the system theming and see if the application follows some scaling/color changes correctly.
In this case some subset of apple provided apps weren't following the theme and they fixed it by adding a private css property.
Vs some other OS vendor that likely removed most of the theme controls so they didn't have to keep fixing a huge pile of 1/2 baked abandoned toolkits scattered across their product portfolio.
"All toupées look fake. I've never seen one that I couldn't tell was fake."
"The Toupée Theory of In-App Webviews" is perfect. I might change it in the post.
Fwiw I think the personal attribution gives it a nice touch.
“Alastair’s Toupee’s theory of in-app WebViews”?
Totally agree with the sibling comment, you should own it! Just made me think of that quote haha.
you write really well OP! please keep it up.
Thanks! I'm hoping to continue down this path and write up some thoughts on how you might actually achieve seamless in-app webviews at some point but, y'know... time.
In the meantime (hey, it's already a thread of self-promotion) my last writeup was about the native views WKWebView generates when you use hardware accelerated CSS transforms:
https://alastair.is/learning-about-what-happens-when-you-use...
run it
There's also, in there somewhere, a corollary about how you don't notice the webviews which don't stick out but just don't feel right. Like, someone mentioned Settings app in MacOS might use them because the icons don't load fast enough.
I can't help but lament just a little bit. Apple used to be about insane polish. Just think about the mentality that created the rounded screen corners on the original Mac. That's just crazy and I admire it.
> Apple used to be about insane polish.
I think that's mostly a brand narrative/myth. MacOS has always had warts at any given time.
No kidding. I grew up loving Macs in general, but despite some people's rose-tinted views of classic macOS in the 80's and 90's, I always had uncontrollable pangs of stabbiness every time I had to do anything in the cluttered, clunky, and tiny interface of Chooser.
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere. The fact that none of us have noticed exactly where suggests that we're interacting with webviews in our daily use of iOS without ever even realising it.
This is what stood out to me. I've never really suspected webviews and can't think of a place now.
I often suspect things in Settings, esp. account/iCloud section to be webviews, just based on how they load (icons appearing a short moment after the page opens for example).
Yes, those parts of the Settings app are built with web views that embed React Web:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424
When you tap some of the menu items in the “Saved to iCloud” section, they don’t have the normal grey item highlight that happens with the rest of the settings app.
The App Store app seems to be using web views extensively.
Both Mail and Calendar use web views for starters.
I assume they're going to use it on Apple.com, the same way that they were using backdrop-filter to simulate the frosted glass on earlier iOSes
according to the post, it doesn't exist on Safari
I’m fairly certain Apple Music makes pretty heavy use of webviews.
Actually it does not. It used to, but then was rewritten. The Accessibility Inspector app can be used to see what's the class of the UI elements, if you want to check.
I’m sure there are many apps like the Apple Store app and parts of the App Store that pull in web views. That’s most likely what this is for. Probably parts of News, Music, Games apps as well.
Honestly, why don't they just add it to Safari as a css property?
I'm confident we'll have a ton of websites trying to replicate the Liquid Glass aesthetic, and will do so in a way that will eat half your laptops CPU.
As the article notes, with this in CSS, it's extremely easy to have different CSS depending on whether this is available or not. At the same time, it's not like other browsers don't do "non-standard" things.
I'm not saying I love Liquid Glass and I want it everywhere, but I prefer to have proper Liquid Glass everywhere on Safari, over having a custom unoptimized laggy unpolished version of it.
Nice find!
Apple's new glass UI seems to draw a lot of ire, but I... kinda like it? It feels like the OS has some actual personality again instead of just being flat and boring. I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text again. I view it as a welcome change. It's not just "nostalgia" either. It has actual utility.
I installed the iOS 26 Beta to test some things on the websites I maintain in advance of it going public, and while there are some issues here and there I think the overall direction to add more personality back into the OS is a good one. Normies will love it.
I like the glass effects and aesthetics, but I think the functionality in a lot of the apps isn't as good as it was. A lot of things that were easy-to-reach buttons are now tucked away in menus, and harder to find.
> I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text
The bar is high
True, but Apple did this to themselves. Their flat UI also drew a lot of ire for this initially, especially from accessibility concerned circles.
Count me in the "I think this look is horrendous!" crowd, along with the "What were you thinking, Apple?!?!" crowd.
It's just terrible.
Interesting, using webviews is a common shortcut for a lot of functionality, and even native apps will occasionally have some webviews (that you might not even notice) out of convenience (and sometimes necessity).
Apple themselves run into these exact cases and develop a compromise for themselves, while at the same time telling third party developers that aren't allowed to use the exact same compromise, and they MUST use Apple's native UI if they want liquid glass...
Let's pray this liquid jelly doesnt become a trend
Love or hate liquid glass, the paradigm shift from "UI chrome is a wrapper around app content" to "UI is overlayed on top of app content" seems like the future. It's well aligned with AR and better separates UI layout from content for different screen sizes.
I'm neutral on this first implementation (some good, some bad). But I think the approach will be picked up by essentially everyone. Good news for you, there's nothing saying the overlay UI model has to be transparent. Some will probably be opaque but still floating.
I don't buy it.
First, AR is currently aspirational at best. After decades of failures.
Second, overlaying translucid UI over content makes separation of UI from content worse, not better.
Windows Aero tried that 2 decades ago and, while it looked cool, they reverted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero
VR is still aspirational, but we already have AR making baby steps into everything. Every time you see a QR code for the menu burned into a restaurant table, you're looking at a sort of AR: the phone sees it differently than you. Then there's games, but that seems to be largely a passing fad, like 3D TV.
I know, it barely qualifies as AR... but while I love watching the bleeding edge of tech, I'm glad overall that we're slow-rolling this kind of thing.
> seems like the future
Please, please cite sources for this. Without context you are really just drawing conjecture here.
Apple certainly seems invested in the idea of an AR future. But users do not - ARkit integrations are few-and-far between, Pokemon Go is a dead fad and Vision Pro failed harder than almost any other contemporary Apple product. It seems less like Apple is skating to the puck, and more like they're begging someone to pass to them. But the rest of the industry seems content ignoring the AR industry to invest away from Apple into stocks like Nvidia. Simultaneously, Apple threw away their stake in consortiums like Khronos, signalling a lack of desire to engage in new software standards.
With how many roadblocks Apple is facing here, I have no idea how you'd conclude that forcing AR on their users is a preferred paradigm.
Younger generation is obsessed with nostalgia for Aero/Glass and that whole era's aesthetic. It will definitely become a trend, if not for that then because Apple did it and the industry has lost all innovation outside of "copy whatever Apple does."
As a fan of aero, I hope Google copies the Apple theme with their own aero theme.
There are some places where I hope Apple improves things like legibility and contrast, but I'll take anything over the bland, flat designs of the Window 8 era.
Wow, I didn't stop to think how Windows Vista is actually quite close to 20 years old now. It and Windows 7 still feel "modern" in my mind.
I do wish they didn't make it bounce and jiggle so much. It changes the whole thing from looking like glass to looking like a gelatinous blob.
Same boat as you - hope it doesn't but I'm pretty sure it will. Apple is doing it, so other companies will jump on the same bandwagon.
Already has
> you have to toggle a setting in WKPreferences called useSystemAppearance... and it's private. So if you use it, say goodbye to App Store approval.
is this true? i know very little of iOS development but i swear i remember watching a decompilation of an app that used various internal APIs to provide animated home screen widgets
That would not get through the App Store review process.
thinking of youtube.com/watch?v=NdJ_y1c_j_I ?
How is this any different from the effect shown in this Codepen?
https://codepen.io/GreggOD/pen/xLbboZ
> the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly.
My guess would be that the App Store apps on iOS and macOS and the Music app rely on these seamless web views for a lot of their dynamic layout content.
Liquid Glass icons look like crap and it's pretty broken on iOS.
Mapbox is such a pretty piece of software.
Did they provide a CSS feature to prevent modals being cut off at the Safari toolbar?
"Liquid Glass" ... you mean that effect that Windows 7 did in like 2007 or so?
No, Windows 7 actually did a glass texture, whereas this is just a blur with marketing.
Chromatic aberration ain’t blur
> Whoever it was at Apple that decided to make this a CSS property is a genius because it makes it incredibly easy to provide different rules based on Liquid Glass support
What is genius here? Create something, that nobody asked for, create an in-house CSS property to use across approved apps. Genius? I would simply call this a dirty trick.
There are a lot of things, that they could have implemented, according to the CSS spec. But they decided to spend workforce on this shit. Yeah, they are a business and free to do whatever they want with their money. But I don’t like their choices.
> the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly
very true, and why I got out of mobile app development when I noticed like a decade ago, scrubbed my whole resume of it to switch to other kinds of dev
I'm surprised there is still demand for that though, but I've found other solutions to be good enough, when a phone is involved
For those who don't know what the fuck "Liquid Glass effect" is: it's a sort of frosted glass look that apple uses for their UI.
It's being sold as the best thing since sliced bread. Googling it felt like I entered a parallel universe.
Windows 7 did it like 15 years ago
Windows 7's had more character.
Windows 7 built a design language around it, transparency was never the main attraction.
Which is smart. Contrast is king, especially on consumer hardware where grandma might not see too well in her late age. It wasn't the glass effects of Vista or Yosemite that appealed to people, it was the high-contrast UI elements and skeuomorphic design elements (neither of which are present in liquid glass).
> But my suggestion is this: the main reason webviews in apps have such a bad reputation is because you don't notice the webviews that are integrated seamlessly.
Integration is one thing.
The more important thing is resource consumption: Steam for example always gulps 300MB of my precious RAM for two Webview processes that aren't needed anywhere - and earlier versions actually offered a flag to disable the webviews from getting started. On Android, apps using WebView routinely means that either all other apps get OOM'd or in the worst case, the app itself gets OOM'd from its own web view with very weird side effects when whatever the webview was used for is done.
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