Acorn 8.3 With Liquid Glass

Acorn 8.3 is out and the big new feature is that it supports Liquid Glass for folks who are running macOS Tahoe (which is over 50% of Acorn 8 users at this point!).

Actually, Acorn 8.3 came out a few weeks ago and the current release1 at the time of this writing is 8.3.2. I wanted to sit on an announcement a bit because I knew the refinements were going to be coming fast and I was really hoping macOS 26.1 would be released soon (it had some bugs that hurt Acorn in a number of ways). Also, you really shouldn’t be running macOS Tahoe unless you’ve updated to 26.1 (the initial release was very bumpy).

At any rate, what’s new? Basically the UI. That’s it. The full release notes are available as usual (and it includes some minor changes and bug fixes).

But the UI was a ton of work! And I made it extra difficult on myself by making Liquid Glass optional. Why the heck would I do that?

There were a couple of reasons (besides some people really, really not liking Liquid Glass).

First of all, Acorn still supports macOS 14 and 15. And if you recall, Liquid Glass is only available on macOS 26. So any changes I’d make to Acorn would also have to work fine on previous OS releases. So in a sense,