macOS 27 Golden Gate Reverses Awful Menu Item Icons

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…