Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:

In macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple has removed many of the menu item icons that are so prevalent throughout macOS 26 Tahoe, as spotted by Nikita “Tonsky” Prokopov (via Daring Fireball). The developer shared before-and-after screenshots on Mastodon to evidence the reversal.

Tahoe was the first version of macOS to place a small icon next to nearly every entry in the menu bar across Apple’s apps, but the change drew swift criticism from designers and developers. Many of the icons are inconsistent and often difficult to understand on their own, with different Apple apps showing different icons for the same menu items.

Most system menus in macOS Golden Gate no longer have icons at all, and the ones that do are consistent across system apps. For instance, the Share button always has a share icon (square.and.arrow.up). Third-party apps that previously adopted menu item icons no longer display them on macOS Golden Gate — developers must programmatically specify that icons are required for particular menu items. (They still appear in macOS 26 Tahoe, even when compiled on the macOS Golden Gate software development kit.) Apple appears to adopt icons for major controls: Passwords and Finder use them for views listed in the sidebar, for instance.

I suppose most Mac developers will leave all icons off because that’s now the default behavior. (To override this behavior, as Apple does, developers should use .labelStyle(.titleAndIcon) in SwiftUI and NSMenuItem.preferredImageVisibility in AppKit.) Developers who do choose to adopt the new guidance will have to do it with intention. Every app will be different and choose to use icons in different menu items. This is not an inconsistency — it appreciates that every app is different and requires various user interface considerations. The old icons were ambiguous because they assumed every app needed an icon for every menu. The new system permits choice, and, ergo, tasteful UI design. And it’s not like apps that choose to eschew icons entirely will look dated, either.

The same goes for the new, tighter corner radius. All apps, regardless of their UI framework, use a single corner radius. It looks amazing in macOS Golden Gate — one of those tweaks you recognize as soon as you boot up the computer for the first time. macOS Tahoe looked like it was designed by a child with Fisher-Price blobs and rounded rectangles throughout. The new windows, combined with the more Aqua-like Liquid Glass elements, feel “grown-up.” They look like they’ve been designed with care and by someone who knows something — anything — about UI design. Again, it’s instantly recognizable and striking.

There are lots of other tweaks, too, like the new sidebars that no longer float over the window. They’re just great. They look every bit as Liquid Glass as the previous version, but they feel like they take up less space. Your eyes are forced to focus on fewer specular highlights and disoriented corner radii. Fundamentally, there’s less happening in the interface. Toolbars just look normal again — they don’t float over the content as they did in macOS Tahoe. The toolbar is unabashedly a toolbar, and the sidebar is unashamedly a sidebar. Whoever thought elements explicitly marked as “bars” should be part of the main content was not thinking straight. macOS Golden Gate might be my favorite operating system this year.