Tailscale's new macOS home

The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"

No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.

I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.

Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.

This could have been handled better.

Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar.

```

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2

```

> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all.

Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.

This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want:

access to my home server

ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)

ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)

ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.

I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

Useful menu bar manager for Mac that lets you hide multiple icons behind a single icon: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool.

Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning.

Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer

Apple should solve this. Windows got a little menu that can popup this can't be that hard

The new window is nice and useful, but I find the window’s header to be on the very thick side.

Nowadays, that whole header should probably leave in the sidebar itself, and the sidebar could probably be more "Liquid Glass"-like.

> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices

As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions.

I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!

Menu items are so convenient.

Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent.

Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left.

I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.

Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale with a passkey without using third party sso.

I use https://apps.apple.com/at/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066 Hidden Bar to workaround the menu bar problem.

This feels like one of those bugs that sounds niche until you put a work Mac through the usual gauntlet of VPN, MDM, chat, calendar, backup, and whatever else corp IT adds. Not catastrophic, but it is kind of wild that macOS still has no first party overflow affordance for menu bar icons.

Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable.

But am I misremembering this?

> no options to rearrange the menu bar items

This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an icon to rearrange the order.

Back in the Mac OS X public beta days (and maybe even into 10.0–10.1?), apps that are nowadays shoved into the menu at used to live in the Dock. I kinda think I prefer that.

I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.

I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a slightly shorter resolution than the default.

I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.

I always assumed the justification for the notch would be FaceID on Macs. However, it’s been many generations and we still don’t see it.

I don't understand why people are still using Tailscale after the issue they had where two independent tunnels were connected together.

i love that they posted a snippet of Swift code showing other developers how to detect this themselves!

> Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality

but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality, though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad design either.

I’ve been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I’m not sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better alternatives I’m not aware of.

The hidden notch issue is a pretty big problem. I had to look for tools to shrink the width spacing just to survive, and it just looks bad

As a workaround, can Tailscale internally add multiple menu items and keep adding until one reports as visible?

The only reason I used Tailscale's menubar applet was to change exit nodes, I definitely don't need a whole UI.

Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)

Anyone know if this new windowed Tailscale view is enabled on the non-App Store version?

I guess I'll find out soon enough once I update, but I didn't see any specific callout in the article.

would love to be able to run two accounts (two tailnets) on my MBP. Haven't figured out a good solution.

This is all cool, but to allow ssh access I still need to install tailscale through brew?

i don't get it.

I really thought this was going to be an Apple acquires Tailscale post

I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK.

My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility.

TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.

yesterday i setup tailscale on a gcp VM.

i enabled route advertising and managed to ping my google cloud instances using tailscale

problem is the packet loss rate is high. SSH tunnel worked!

soo i think there is something wrong with tailscale

I don't see what this has to do with the notch. There's limited space in the menu bar. The overflow is hidden with or without the notch.

It is a bit weird that Apple hasn't provided a simple UI indicator that some icons are hidden. All that's needed is a dot with a tooltip that opens the settings to configure the menu icons.

There's so much tailscale shilling on hn and if you say anything neutral you're voted down.

I use a wallpaper with a horizontal black bar at the top to make the notch invisible, so this catches me off guard pretty often.

Yes! More windowed interfaces! I hate apps that outgrow a modal. I hate losing the context. No wait I think I hate all modals.

Mullvad, your turn next please

Tailscale is really losing the plot to the movie.

It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card.

I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.