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uBar is a taskbar replacement for the macOS Dock that organises open applications and their windows into a familiar, compact strip. Version 4.2.5 was released on 2026-09-15 and runs on both Apple Silicon and 64-bit Intel hardware.
System requirements: from High Sierra to Tahoe
- macOS 10.13 or later, including macOS Tahoe 26.0
- Apple Silicon and 64-bit Intel processors
- Interface: English, German, Danish, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish, French, Swedish, Japanese
What the taskbar brings
Instead of a unified launcher-and-switcher, uBar separates concerns: running tasks are grouped by window, so three Finder windows appear as a single expandable entry. The bar can be positioned along any screen edge and styled with alternate themes to suit a light or dark setup. The current release addresses two specific bugs on macOS Tahoe 26.0, including a CPU and memory leak triggered when the menu icon displayed the user account photo, and incorrect menu positioning.
First steps: a few settings worth adjusting
Out of the box, uBar draws itself as a single row at the bottom of the screen. That works for a first look, but the bar really earns its place once you lift a few defaults. Open preferences and head to Position: moving the bar to the left or right edge of a wide display keeps it within peripheral vision and frees vertical space for content. From the Size tab, increasing the height to two or three rows makes window labels legible at a glance when many applications are open, and a five-row setup turns the bar into a proper overview panel on large monitors.
Under Behaviour, the grouping mode is worth a deliberate choice. The default groups by application, which suits most workflows, but switching to group by similarity can pull together, say, two browsers and a Markdown editor under one cluster while keeping system utilities separate. The hotkey shortcuts deserve attention early: mapping a single keystroke to cycle through an app's windows, or to summon a specific pinned group, removes the need to reach for the mouse during repetitive tasks. If the bar feels too bright against a dark desktop, the Themes pane contains a flat dark option that sits unobtrusively against a charcoal wallpaper or a code editor in full screen—no transparency tricks, just a solid, calm strip.
Interface detail: the user account icon
Version 4.2.5 fixed a leak tied to the menu icon when it displayed the user account photo on macOS 26. After updating, it is safe to leave that icon visible; the memory drain no longer occurs. For anyone who prefers a simpler look, the icon can be swapped to a static uBar logo in the Menu Icon preference pane, which also avoids any future cosmetic surprises after a macOS point release.
How uBar fits with other apps and macOS features
uBar does not disable the Dock—it runs alongside it unless you choose otherwise—and that coexistence matters when other utilities are in play. With the Dock hidden on the left, a vertical uBar on the right creates a two-edge system: launching and the Trash stay on the Dock, while window management and live task previews live on the bar. Magnet or Rectangle still snap windows into halves and quarters without interference; the bar respects the resulting window frames rather than overlapping them, provided the screen-edge offset is set to a few pixels in uBar's Margins panel.
Spaces and Mission Control work as expected. Clicking a uBar entry for an app that has windows spread across multiple desktops brings the most recently used window forward; holding the Option key while clicking switches to the desktop that holds the app's last active window. For anyone who pairs a macOS ubar setup with Alfred or Raycast, the bar handles the visual layer of multitasking while the launcher handles text-driven actions—the two rarely conflict because uBar concerns itself with what is already running, not with what should open next.
On the audio side, the bar's application indicators can show mute states and playback status for music and conferencing apps. In a studio environment, that means glancing at the bar to confirm whether a call is still live or a render has finished, without switching windows or hunting for a dock badge. The bar's window previews—small floating thumbnails that appear on hover—use the macOS window server, so they refresh in near real-time for apps that update their content continuously, such as video editors or system monitors.
Version changes: what the latest releases fixed in daily use
Before 4.2.5, a reproducible leak on macOS Tahoe 26.0 caused CPU usage to climb steadily when the menu bar icon showed the user account photo. In practical terms, owners of a mac ubar installation on a recent MacBook Air or MacBook Pro could notice the fans spinning up after a few hours of idle time, and Activity Monitor would point squarely at uBar. The fix in 4.2.5 eliminates that drain entirely; the icon can display the photo without consequence.
The same release corrected menu positions on macOS Tahoe 26.0, where drop-downs from the bar's application menus could appear offset by several pixels or on the wrong display edge. After updating, right-click menus for grouped window entries land exactly under the pointer, which matters when you are skimming a long list of open tabs or documents and need a predictable target. The combination of these two fixes means the bar behaves identically on Tahoe and on older macOS releases, a consistency that was briefly broken by Apple's window-server changes in version 26.
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