Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

I'm an antitrust nerd - 20+ years since I made my first PACER account as a teenager to get documents from interesting cases..

95% of what people call "anticompetitive" or "monopolistic" has no legal bearing. People don't know the legal definition of those words and bandy them about based on vibes.

This however, is a very very clear case of violations of precedent. If we look at Microsoft's final judgement https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-133 see F(1)(a), H(2)(b), while these stipulations haven't been applied to Apple, if I were in a market dominant position, I'd be super careful about capricious restrictions like the example undocumented API, and behavior that mimics patterns of activity that were seen as actionably sanctionable to similar market dominant forces

With every other app using a web view.

> without referring to monopolies

Of course it’s about monopolies. Safari is still “privileged” to be forced default browser. Making an alternative, Apple ensured to be very hard and expensive. So gating any kind of first party feature is a big no.

If Apple uses this CSS liquid glass effect in their apps, it'll pass App Store review just fine.

Do you see the issue now?

What apple does and what the article talks about: They have a CSS property that ONLY they can use, you can't put that in your PWA, it won't work (no matter the browser).

Apple does plenty of bad things, and many are worse than this, but it doesn't mean it's not fair to point out this one is bad, too.

It all comes down to "the vendor can do things with your computer you can't do yourself" in the end.

I think that's mostly a brand narrative/myth. MacOS has always had warts at any given time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424

First, AR is currently aspirational at best. After decades of failures.

Second, overlaying translucid UI over content makes separation of UI from content worse, not better.

Windows Aero tried that 2 decades ago and, while it looked cool, they reverted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

Please, please cite sources for this. Without context you are really just drawing conjecture here.

Apple certainly seems invested in the idea of an AR future. But users do not - ARkit integrations are few-and-far between, Pokemon Go is a dead fad and Vision Pro failed harder than almost any other contemporary Apple product. It seems less like Apple is skating to the puck, and more like they're begging someone to pass to them. But the rest of the industry seems content ignoring the AR industry to invest away from Apple into stocks like Nvidia. Simultaneously, Apple threw away their stake in consortiums like Khronos, signalling a lack of desire to engage in new software standards.

With how many roadblocks Apple is facing here, I have no idea how you'd conclude that forcing AR on their users is a preferred paradigm.

There are some places where I hope Apple improves things like legibility and contrast, but I'll take anything over the bland, flat designs of the Window 8 era.

Which is smart. Contrast is king, especially on consumer hardware where grandma might not see too well in her late age. It wasn't the glass effects of Vista or Yosemite that appealed to people, it was the high-contrast UI elements and skeuomorphic design elements (neither of which are present in liquid glass).