macOS 26 and new app icons

[Avi Drissman]

macOS 26 introduces a new type of icon for app icons, which requires an asset catalog, which a standard build of Chromium doesn't have. I am not aware of whether downstream folks have been modernizing their apps to have asset catalogs already, so if you do, congrats! you are ahead of me.

Given the current build situation, it was decided to build the .car files locally and commit them in parallel to the current .icns files. Perhaps in the future we will move to building the asset catalogs as part of the build, but this is good enough for now. We also plan on moving to more modern usage of UTTypeIcons/UTTypeIconBadgeName/UTTypeIconText for document icons.

If you already have asset catalogs and a custom Info.plist, this might not affect you at all. If you have nothing custom and simply override the .icns file then watch out! as you may need to override the parallel committed .car file so that you don't accidentally ship the Chromium app icon when I switch the Info.plist to use CFBundleIconName. Or you are somewhere in-between. In any case, given that this could affect y'all, I wanted to give a heads-up.

I hope this isn't controversial, and I'm sure that most downstream folks have already put a lot of thought and consideration into how their new macOS 26 icons should look and work, but in case something doesn't seem right or you have questions, please reach out.

With excitement at seeing everyone's cool new icons,

Avi

Chrome Mac team, lead