> 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’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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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
Not sure it is "plainly anticompetitive" in the legal sense. In the US, the laws on anti-competitive practices are the Sherman Act and the Clayton act. To be anticompetitive, the courts use the "per se" rule and the "rule of reason". "per se" rule covers things which are specifically listed in the laws as being anticompetitive (eg price fixing).
This isn't in the list of per se anticompetitive practises so it would need to be covered by the "rule of reason". That would require someone to demonstrate actual harm to competition that flowed directly from the illegal nature of the practise and was not compensated by some offsetting procompetitive benefit and there is no less restrictive alternative.
I don't see how a CSS property would meet the standard of actual harm to competition, especially since noone is stopping you from making your own liquid glass css if you want to (as far as I can see).
But there's no evidence yet that it's being used by first-party programs, e.g. by GarageBand or Pages or Mail.app.
It's also quite likely that it's a) not being used at all, and the private API is just for internal testing until it's ready to be made public, and/or b) used by certain OS components that aren't competing with third-party apps (e.g. somewhere in the Settings panel).
And while I agree with your assertion in theory, some cosmetic styling is probably about the least important, most trivial example you could come up with... can't really get myself worked up about this one.
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."
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.
> 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
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.
Some of it is because of looks, but the overwhelming majority of criticism is due to bugs and legibility and accessibility issues. Liquid Glass is at best half-baked, especially on macOS. It got tweaked so much from their WWDC presentation, you can tell it was rushed and no one really thought it through.
As a short example, go into System Settings, do a search, then scroll the view and look at the search bar. Or go into a folder, scroll it, and watch the contents screw with the title.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
> 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
> 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.
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.
> 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…
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea.
If I had to guess, probably in the iCloud settings inside of the Settings app. Also in the App Store/Music/TV account page (when you tap on your avatar in the top right of the app.) A bunch of those pages have quite well hidden web views pretending to be native ones, mainly loading things from the iTunes backend services (the give away is normally that you can long press <a> links and a web page preview pops up.) It's probably being used for the user guide inside of the Tips app as well.
At this stage it really feels like features like this’ only purpose is to make older models struggle with basic UI stuff just so people upgrade to the newer devices.
I'm sure they know with the latest OS release that a lot of people are going to want to start using this immediately, perhaps they want to work out the public use of it internally first?
There's definitely some unfounded accusations going on in this thread about this too. Maybe they're right? Maybe they're wrong?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 67.0 ms ] threadThis is what stood out to me. I've never really suspected webviews and can't think of a place now.
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.
But this is exactly why you SHOULD be outraged.
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.
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.
If you mean "anti-competitive" without referring to monopolies, then, well, every company does that.
Look at the m3/4 macs they are insane machines because even the hardware is unified.
This isn't in the list of per se anticompetitive practises so it would need to be covered by the "rule of reason". That would require someone to demonstrate actual harm to competition that flowed directly from the illegal nature of the practise and was not compensated by some offsetting procompetitive benefit and there is no less restrictive alternative.
I don't see how a CSS property would meet the standard of actual harm to competition, especially since noone is stopping you from making your own liquid glass css if you want to (as far as I can see).
It's also quite likely that it's a) not being used at all, and the private API is just for internal testing until it's ready to be made public, and/or b) used by certain OS components that aren't competing with third-party apps (e.g. somewhere in the Settings panel).
And while I agree with your assertion in theory, some cosmetic styling is probably about the least important, most trivial example you could come up with... can't really get myself worked up about this one.
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.
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
It's being sold as the best thing since sliced bread. Googling it felt like I entered a parallel universe.
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.
Some of it is because of looks, but the overwhelming majority of criticism is due to bugs and legibility and accessibility issues. Liquid Glass is at best half-baked, especially on macOS. It got tweaked so much from their WWDC presentation, you can tell it was rushed and no one really thought it through.
As a short example, go into System Settings, do a search, then scroll the view and look at the search bar. Or go into a folder, scroll it, and watch the contents screw with the title.
> Normies will love it.
Here’s a sample of one hating it.
https://www.threads.com/@chrispirillo/post/DOpUPrIiYdX
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.
https://codepen.io/GreggOD/pen/xLbboZ
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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…
If I had to guess, probably in the iCloud settings inside of the Settings app. Also in the App Store/Music/TV account page (when you tap on your avatar in the top right of the app.) A bunch of those pages have quite well hidden web views pretending to be native ones, mainly loading things from the iTunes backend services (the give away is normally that you can long press <a> links and a web page preview pops up.) It's probably being used for the user guide inside of the Tips app as well.
That's where I'd be looking at least.
I'm sure they know with the latest OS release that a lot of people are going to want to start using this immediately, perhaps they want to work out the public use of it internally first?
There's definitely some unfounded accusations going on in this thread about this too. Maybe they're right? Maybe they're wrong?