macOS 26 Tahoe Screen Saver issues

Question

XMI OP

Created Jun ’25

Replies 17

Boosts 1

Participants 5

Noticing a few issues with Screen Savers in macOS Tahoe developer beta 1 :

The command

open x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.ScreenSaver-Settings.extension

no longer works to open the Screen Savers preference pane. The reason? There is no longer a Screen Saver preference pane - it still exists, but it's now a Modal dialog (that can not be resized) that is opened from within the Wallpaper preference pane, by clicking a button.

Something funny is happening with legacyScreensaver - I think that

ScreenSaverView.Init(frame:isPreview)

may be passing wrong values, e.g. the isPreview boolean is false in Preview mode?

I've submitted Feedback # FB17895600 about some of these, and will report back more as I figure things out.

Please feel free to add to this thread, thanks!

Answered by DTS Engineer in 843065022

Thanks for testing this stuff immediately and then filing those bugs. Screen savers are such a niche thing that it’s critical to get this issues noted early in the beta cycle.

If you encounter any other issues, please post the bug numbers here so that they’re on my radar (so to speak).

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Boost

Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

3w

Yep. Sadly, that’s expected )-:

There are actually a bunch of bugs mentioned in this thread, so let me summarise:

FB19580645 — This is the scroll view nib issue. Looking at the underlying bug (r. 157494480) it’s hard to tell when the fix for this will land [1]. Given that, I recommend that you continue to test with macOS and Xcode betas as we seed them.
FB6363533, FB19235887 — These are both requests for a new screen saver API based on appex technology. I think it’s safe to say that that won’t happen in macOS 26 |-:
FB19201567, FB19204084, FB19206021 — These are all functionality issues with the existing screen saver API. I don’t have any news to share here. Certainly, I don’t expect to see improvements in 26.0b7.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] It’s always hard with nib bugs because part of the code lives in the OS and part of the code lives in Xcode.

0

Answer 2

C_Wiz OP

1d

@DTS Engineer

Updated to RC and sadly, no changes on the big screensaver bugs.

FB19204084 is by far the worst.

Our workaround for it is imperfect and I had reports from users where in some circumstances, "something" gets messed up and after that macOS will just refuse to try to launch the 3rd party screensaver (giving users a black screen).

Only fix in those scenarios is to restart macOS, which is the worse thing I can tell a mac user to do.

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