Edit: Looks like you can opt-out of that “new look and feel” pretty easily under the appearance settings but still, whats with putting rounded corners everywhere?
Edit 2: “Explore the web with a softer, more friendly aesthetic featuring rounded corners […] Designed to complement your operating system, whether on Windows 11, MacOS, or Linux.” The fuck does that mean? Windows 11 fair enough but most Linux distros don’t look like that at all.
I’ve noticed that there’s a shift in UI design currently back to the 2000s style of round UI design, which eventually moved out of the way for nice straight crisp corners when we shifted from CRTs to LCDs which could render pixel perfect images at last.
We never limited the viewport on a browser of course, that’s madness. But just look at XP’s bubbly design and interfaces of the time vs Win8/10’s very angular, clean crisp interface.
I do hope we’re not descending back into an age of curves, I’m not a fan. But styles come and go every few decades, and maybe younger people today are ready to experience their “age of curves” for the first time?
I wish cars stopped being curvy and went back to rectangle lights and straight lines
It might just be down to nostalgia, especially when it comes to the early 2000s Windows XP style aesthetic. Just think about all the Vaporwave stuff (although that seems to be mostly late-90s-ish).
I’m more of a Windows Aero fan, myself. Frutiger Aero in general has a very dystopian vibe for me but I’m a sucker for transparency.
I miss integrated transparency