Why Safari's URL Bar goes opaque and how to fix it

If anything looks wrong, read on the site! Context When Apple unveiled Liquid Glass and showed the new floating URL bar for iOS 26, a sense of dread set over me: what is the browser going to do with the space behind the URL bar? So many websites rely on the URL bar being an opaque (or nearly opaque) part of the UI, and therefore anchor important elements to the bottom of the screen. The web is built on many things, but one of them has always been the most important: backwards compatibility. A website launched in 1995 should (and does!) work just the same now as it did back then. It’s the reason we have “wrong” defaults for CSS properties like box-sizing, or why we need to explicitly tell the browser our website is responsive. Changing those would break websites that were made before the new behaviors were even invented. This kind of UI change, while not necessarily changing the rendered result, is worrisome. The browser chrome stops being something surrounding the website, and starts…