Mon, 05 Jan 2026 10:13:00 UTC
we really cant escape awful trends in tech, can we? weve all seen what apple did to ios. everyone is calling it "liquid ass". i dont really want to call it that because it does actually look really pretty, i do genuinely love the effect. but not for ui elements. applying this look to a ui was a terribly misguided decision. how the hell am i supposed to read text if the background is clear?? and yet, despite all the complaints, inspiration spreads.
nextcloud recently (?) released v32.0.0, or "Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn". oh i guess its not really that recent then is it. september?? okay i should really update this more often. anyway, they potentially took inspiration from apple's liquid glass and added a little gradient to the icons in the header. well, it was little. then they decided to push it. 75% opacity? too high. 70%? nope, still not it. 65%? yeah, thats the one. and its still WCAG AA compliant! cool, merge it. but... what if we went.. even lower? i really have no idea how these numbers work because i havent gotten enough sleep but they made it more transparent. and merged it. and shipped it. its not compliant. they fell right in the liquid glass trap: form over function.
i wrote a userstyle to fix this because i prefer to be able to understand the icons im looking at. install stylus and paste this in or something. dont forget to change example.com to your nextcloud server.
/* ==UserStyle==
@name remove nextcloud header gradients
@namespace github.com/openstyles/stylus
@version 1.0.0
@description nextcloud 32.0.0 added gradients to the header and i dont like them
@author stringlapse
==/UserStyle== */
@-moz-document domain("example.com") {
/* Insert code here... */
header{
--header-menu-icon-mask: none
}
}