Golden Gate Beta 6 Turns Stoplights into Liquid Glass

Developer Beta 6 of the 27 OSes is out today, and the macOS build has something I didn’t really expect this late in the game: redesigned window controls! Like before, hovering over the “stoplight” controls with the cursor reveals the close, minimize, and junk drawer that has become the former maximize button. Tahoe is on the left; Golden Gate Beta 6 is on the right: (Trying to line up screenshots between a MacBook Neo and a MacBook Pro using a Pro Display XDR was …fun. Click the image to enlarge it.) Apple has moved away from the solid colors it has used since Yosemite, applying Liquid Glass to one of the most fundamental parts of the macOS interface. Over the last year, people have joked that Liquid Glass is a bad ripoff of the original Aqua. I haven’t really bought into that, but these window controls certainly echo the past. Here’s a screenshot from Mac OS X 10.1 Puma: I like the whimsy in these new window controls, and from what I have already seen online, I’m not alone. But I…