MacOS 26 has been out for a few days now and users are finding things have gone missing or aren’t working as they expected. Some of these are deliberate design decisions by Apple, some of these are problems with third-party apps.
Here’s a rundown of things that have changed and how you might be able to fix them.
macOS 26: Where’s Launchpad Gone?
One feature that many Mac owners seem to be missing is Launchpad, the iPad-like app launcher that displayed all of your installed applications in a grid of icons.
Apple has deprecated Launchpad in macOS 26 and replaced it with the Apps launcher in the Dock.
In many ways, it’s similar to Launchpad – click on the Apps icon and you get a grid of app icons, listed in alphabetical order, that you can scroll through. You can also search for apps through this menu, as you can from the enhanced Spotlight facility.
However, what people are missing is the ability to organize apps in their preferred order, or to group individual apps in themed folders (such as games, for example), which was one of the chief advantages of Launchpad.
While there’s no easy way to replicate the Launchpad, you can still create shortcuts to your favorite applications. For example, you can put a folder of your favorite apps into the Dock, giving you quick access in a familiar location.
To do this, create a new folder on your desktop. Then open the Applications folder from Finder, and drag the apps you want to create shortcuts for to into the new folder. Don’t worry, they will still remain in the Applications folder as well as your new folder. When you’ve got all the apps you want, drag the new folder on to the right-hand side of the Dock and you’ll be able to quickly access your selected programs.
Safari’s Compact Tabs
If you use the Safari browser on your Mac, you may have noticed that compact tabs have disappeared. This option allowed you to minimize the amount of space that tabs occupied at the top of the browser window, helping to keep things neat, especially when you’ve got lots of tabs open.
In truth, there are far better browsers out there than Safari, so this might be a good reason to switch. My personal favorite is Vivaldi, which is hugely flexible when it comes to customizing the browser to your personal taste. With Vivaldi you can now display the tabs on any side of the browser window (left, right, top or bottom), group tabs together in stacks, rename tabs and pin them in a compact space on the tab bar.
Broken Bartender
Bartender is a popular Mac app, allowing you to better organize the Menu Bar at the top of the Mac screen and only display the icons you want to see, in whichever order you prefer.
It’s a fabulous little utility that I’ve recommended for many years. However, if you were using Bartender 5, that no longer appears to be compatible with macOS 26. Instead, the company is pushing customers towards Bartender 6, which is fully compatible with macOS 26 (Tahoe), according to the Bartender website.
On my machine, which still had Bartender 5 installed when I updated to macOS 26, it emptied the Menu Bar and created an irritating error that repeatedly kept trying to open the Mac System menu, until I disabled Bartender 5 altogether.
It’s annoying that an app you’ve purchased suddenly stops working with a new version of an operating system, although that irritation is dampened by Bartender’s reasonable upgrade policy, which means it costs $12 to upgrade from a previous version, instead of the full $20.
That said, it’s also something of a hidden cost for the “free” upgrade to macOS 26 – and a fairly steep fee to keep using a one-function utility.