macOS Tahoe broke Finder columns view

January 13 2026

I was investigating a strange Safari issue on macOS Tahoe, which I may or may not blog about later, when I discovered a nasty Finder bug, due to the nasty Liquid Glass redesign. Finder has four view modes, represented by the four consecutive toolbar icons in the screenshot below, if you can even call that free-floating monstrosity a toolbar anymore: Icons, List, Columns, and Gallery. My preference is columns view, which I’ve been using for as long as I remember, going back to Mac OS X.

At the bottom of each column is a resizing widget that you can use to change the width of the columns. Or rather, you could use it to change the width of the columns. On macOS Tahoe, the horizontal scroller covers the resizing widget and prevents it from being clicked! Compare with macOS Sequoia, where the horizontal scroller and scroll bar are below the column and allow access to all of the resizing widgets. (It should be noted that the Tahoe screenshot is from a non-retina display attached to a Mac mini, whereas the Sequoia screenshot is from a MacBook Pro built-in retina display.)

Coincidentally, in an article yesterday, John Gruber mentioned macOS scrollbars on Tahoe:

Here’s an illustrated follow-up regarding the absurdity of MacOS 26’s “looks like they’re rounded off like a child’s toy but actually they’re still rectangles with corners” windows. If you turn on always-visible scrollbars (which you should) and scroll to the bottom, they look like this:

I’ve always showed scrollbars on my Macs for as long as I’ve used columns view, if not longer. Indeed, Mac OS X originally had no option to not show scrollbars. Now you can set the option in the System Settings Appearance pane; the default value is “Automatically based on mouse or trackpad.”

I won’t comment on the transparency in the window, which you can obviously see for yourself.

Notice what happens when you use the default value: not only do the scrollbars disappear, the resizing widgets also disappear.

You can still resize the columns, though, by hovering over the horizontal column border lines. Thus, it appears that the Finder team did not even test with the combination of columns view and always show scroll bars. Or if they did test, Apple did not care that it was broken.

In the same article, Gruber quips:

It would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta a year ago and deliberately sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur.

I habitually delete most of my older social media posts, so unfortunately I don’t have a link anymore, but my RSS feed still has proof of what I said a few weeks ago: