Yosemite adds a known bug with text fields and "vibrancy" blending. It is known that affects popover.
The workaround is to set the appearance property of the table view view to NSAppearanceNameAqua .
This was confirmed by an Apple engineer in their devforums.
EDIT 2019-05-09:
This issue also sometimes affects NSTextFields that appear on pop-ups where the background is gray. Here's the Swift 5 fix, add this to the viewDidLoad () function of your popover controller
self.someTextField.appearance = NSAppearance.init (named: .aqua)
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