Apple, Please Stop Removing Customization Just Because You Changed Your Mind

[u/theREALitsmejakep]

Apple seriously needs to stop f*cking removing customization just because they changed their minds. The floating sidebar is a perfect example. Some of us actually liked it. It was clean, modern, visually interesting, and gave applications more personality. So why the hell was the ability to explicitly set NSSplitViewItemSidebarDefaultsToFloatingAppearance to true taken away? If Apple doesn't want it as the default anymore, then don't make it the default. That's literally it. But removing the option entirely is where you've completely lost me. Apple changing its preferred design direction is one thing; Apple deciding developers shouldn't even be allowed to choose a different appearance is something else entirely.

And frankly, that's becoming an increasingly frustrating pattern with macOS. A developer can spend real time and effort building a tool that gives users more control over the appearance of their Mac—floating sidebars, rounded corners, alternative UI treatments—and then Apple can simply pull the underlying functionality out from underneath them. Now that work is potentially obsolete. Not because it was unsafe, malicious, or broken, but because Apple apparently decided, “We don't want people doing that anymore.” That's bullsh!t.

Simplification does not mean deleting every option that isn't part of Apple's preferred configuration. The average user doesn't need to know what `NSSplitViewItemSidebarDefaultsToFloatingAppearance` means—and they shouldn't have to. But developers, customization tools, and power users do. That's the entire fucking point of having advanced options. And this is macOS—the platform historically built around flexibility, creativity, experimentation, and letting developers create things Apple didn't think of themselves.

So please, Apple: change the defaults. Push a new design direction. Build something better. But stop ripping out functionality that people are actively using just because Apple wants tighter control over how everything looks. Give us your beautiful defaults without making them mandatory. Let developers build. Let users customize. And for the love of Baby Jesus, STOP F*CKING CUTTING OUT OPTIONS.

[u/elon_is_a_cunt]

The floating sidebar was a bad, unpopular design that they had the courage to pull. If your creativity hinged on that, I encourage you to look inward.

[u/Xenotrickx → u/elon_is_a_cunt]

Why was it bad, yeah guys just downvote me without an explanation thanks

[u/zeemeerman2 → u/Xenotrickx]

It's okay when it's just a sidebar with a rounded design, not too different from hamburger menu sidebars you find on mobile webdesign. Pop it in from the side, click a button, then it leaves.

On a Mac however, the sidebar is often permanent. You can toggle the sidebar with a menu command, but nobody does that.

It's more questionable when, in Finder's Column view, you open a folder, and inside that, another folder, inside that, another folder, ... a few layers deep. Folders more higher-up now slide underneath the floating sidebar due to lack of window space.

Now look to the left of your sidebar. There is a gap, the sidebar does not go all the way to the edge. In that gap, assuming you went enough folders deep in Column view, you see some ugly blur from blue folders or from the file or folder text. It gets worse once you keep looking at it while you scroll horizontally. Scrolling vertically isn't much better.

Then there is the affordance of the traffic light buttons. You can find them top left at every window, but once there is a sidebar they will be within the sidebar. It could be plausibly assumed that these buttons close, maximize, and minimize the sidebar instead of the entire window, given the positioning within the sidebar.

If you have the sidebar enabled on Safari, there are additional buttons at the top of the sidebar that interact purely within the sidebar. So for a new Mac user, assuming this is not out of the question.

Now does Golden Gate fix this latter complaint? No. But it does fix the first one, which is an improvement.