Removing Tahoe’s Unwanted Menu Icons

Recently, two widely discussed posts have decried the proliferation of icons in MacOS 26 (Tahoe) menus. First, Jim Nielsen wrote a post in December that referenced Apple’s old Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) advice against using confusing symbols in menus. Next, Nikita Prokopov provided example after infuriating example of just how poorly implemented these icons are on Tahoe.

A Bit of Nuance

It’s not that icons in menus are inherently bad. Indeed, they can be helpful in small doses. We use them to good effect in select places throughout our own apps:

From left to right: Audio device icons in SoundSource; AirPlay device icons in Airfoil; Application icons in Audio Hijack.

The menu icons seen above help differentiate between available options.

Tahoe’s Menu Icons

By contrast, Tahoe’s menu icons are distracting. Their tiny size and monochrome nature make distinguishing between icons difficult even on Retina displays. Apple’s implementation of menu icons across the operating system is simply not good.

Attaching icons to only key items is an idea with some potential, and in the initial Tahoe release, only some menu items had icons. Nevertheless, the inconsistencies in indentation and usage that Nielsen and Prokopov pointed out led to ugly and confusing menus.

Mail’s “View” menu is particularly bad

Tahoe updates have made things worse, by cramming in more and more icons. It now seems Apple intends for every menu item to have an icon, which just doesn’t scale. The result is unhelpful clutter that makes scanning far more difficult.

Apple’s Mess

We often take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Apple’s design changes, and we have not added any menu icons of our own on Tahoe. However, Apple has forced dozens of icons into our applications’ menus. We don’t love the result:

Icons seen in our app menus on Tahoe

The random icons Apple littered about haphazardly made our menus uglier and less usable. Illustrative examples can be found in Audio Hijack and Farrago, which each contain “Import” and “Export” menu items. In Audio Hijack, Apple placed an icon on the “Export” option, but not on the “Import” option. Meanwhile in Farrago, neither item got an icon at all.

Inconsistent icons placed by Apple

In addition to being inconsistent, Apple’s approach feels uncharacteristically heavy-handed. In the past, the company might have led by example in their own apps, while encouraging developers to follow along. But rather than WWDC sessions to educate and assist, they employed an overzealous tactic of running a search and replace on third-party apps, which has produced poor results.

Cleaning Things Up

Since the release of Tahoe, we’ve been stuck with the unattractive menus Apple has imposed upon us. Recently, however, we found we could do better. Thanks to inspiration from our old pal Brent Simmons, we can remove the clutter that’s been foisted upon our apps.1

Our next releases will remove the icons Apple previously forced into our menus. This will restore clean, consistent, icon-free menus to our products.2

Audio Hijack’s current “Session” menu; The forthcoming tidier menu.

As you can see, the clutter-free menus found on MacOS Sequoia and earlier are possible on Tahoe as well. When we next update our apps, we’ll be retaking control of our menus.

Personally, I hope other developers will follow this example. We can’t fix the entire OS, but we don’t have to perpetuate its problems within our own products.

Footnotes:

Brent has provided a more fleshed-out version of his code here. ↩︎

If there are folks who prefer to keep these icons on Tahoe, that will be possible. We’re also adding a new “Restore icons in menus” setting in our Debugging windows.

The “Restore icons in menus” option.

I’ll be interested to see if that gets much use. ↩︎