Apple Has a Private CSS Property to Add Liquid Glass Effects to Web Content

according to the post, it doesn't exist on Safari

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.

It is not. Apple made a big deal about the changeover a few years back.

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.

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.

Private/secret APIs in DOS/Windows were a prominent part of the US and EU antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the 90s/00s.

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.

> I wanted to be outraged at apple, but I really can't. Read WinAPI documentation

But this is exactly why you SHOULD be outraged.

Relative privation fallacy.

“Timmy got away with it. I should get away with it, too.” -Elementary school students

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?

React Native / Expo apps can get liquid glass via the actual underlying native ui elements.

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 don't think it's an improvement, but having a GUI that matches user expectations is undeniably a business advantage.

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?

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).

I can install chrome on Windows, Linux and Mac, so I give them a pass. Not to mention that was ancient history.

Bad example since "-webkit-tap-highlight-color" is initially from Apple, not Google

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.

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.

HN has one of the largest online populations of amateur lawyers with some of the least correct legal opinions in the world. This is one of many, many examples.

Well for starters, no one else is allowed to publish a browser with their own engine on the AppStore, and they've hampered sideloading for years. In a vacuum, it might be reasonable to block any third-party browser engines, or to put something special in their own that no one else can use on the phone, but combining those is just intentional sabotage. And yes, I know that this specific CSS property isn't all that important, but having an argument about how much they're allowed to intentionally sabotage other browsers on their phones is at best a misguided distraction from the point that they shouldn't be doing it in the first place (and not a particularly good defense either; try arguing with a cop who pulls you over for speeding that the law you broke wasn't really that important and see if it gets you out of the ticket).

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.

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.

This isn't available in the Safari browser.

Tech was always a business. What this comment is bringing out is the people who see preferred technical choices as some kind of morality play. They aren’t. They never were. It’s childish to believe such things.

Hey stop bullying the trillion dollar corporation! They are my favourite corporation and their actions are beyond question >:(

What do you mean by unified? Strix Halo is "unified". The M series platform isn't the only unified platform out there.

How would exposing this CSS extension impact unification of the platform?

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.

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.

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

> 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.

Depends on how you implement 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.

"The Toupée Theory of In-App Webviews" is perfect. I might change it in the post.

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).

That always depends on how difficult discoverability is. For example if you're designing for something like Apple Watch there's very limited place for stuff, so you either pack it or you find ways to only show what's most important, using gestures or menus to do other stuff.

Mobile apps having less UI elements immediately visible is not all bad. The hard part of new UX concepts like the new iOS camera button sliding feature is that it's new. Users aren't immediately familiar with it. Not every OS functionality uses it consistently. Etc.

It's probably better to wait a year or two before critiquing Liquid Glass. Change is always risky and takes time to fully roll out and the ecosystem to adopt it widely.

I noticed this in safari where the bookmark icon used to be one click was now two. Fortunately you can change it back in the settings by switching the tab layout (whatever that means)

True, but Apple did this to themselves. Their flat UI also drew a lot of ire for this initially, especially from accessibility concerned circles.

> the only people who seem to think that operating systems should have "personality" are techies

I am not so sure. It might even be the opposite. Techies and designers gave us the flat UI aesthetic, Material UI, Windows Metro design, etc. Techies also nitpick design and aesthetics far more than average folks do. Techies and designers derided Windows XP, but most average users thought it was "cute" and "fun" compared to the "boring" previous design. It is definitely the most memorable release in the past 30 years as far as UI goes. This iOS version could wind up being similar after so many years of the flat UI.

The bugs/kinks are a good point though, and I have noticed some UX changes too that I am unsure about. This is the first complete UI redo in long time for iOS, so I am sure they will get these things worked out over time.

I don't think so, I think the general population gets happy and excited by new things, because they believe it to be somehow better than the old thing. A new cool visual refresh of the OS is something that people gravitate towards, even when it's mostly a superficial restyling hiding decades of cruft (Windows 11)