Microsoft’s Edge browser can be very popular with rounded corners, and a new potential change has been spotted in (limited) testing right now.
Neovin (opens in a new tab) reports that XenoPanther highlighted the possible change on Twitter, with a screenshot showing the Edge Canary (earliest test build) with rounded corners for the actual browser area showing the website.
Just noticed that rounded corners now exist for the area around the visible webpage pic.twitter.com/B0U3RCkb7eJanuary 13, 2023
Even the sidebar for scrolling the website is rounded at the top and bottom, and that’s definitely a look that not everyone will like (we’ll get to that in a moment).
Note that as XenoPanther notes, there are other Edge testers – some of whom chime in in the Twitter thread above – saying they don’t see this change.
So it looks like this is a fix that has only been rolled out to a small number of testers (so-called A/B testing) and depending on how things go it may be rolled out to more people (still in testing, mind – to gauge further response from a larger user base).
Analysis: Consistency first – but is this going too far?
There are people who really don’t like the new rounded look of the central area where the website is displayed in Edge. An additional catch is that rounding occurs not only when the browser is displayed in a window, but also when it is displayed in full screen.
The latter looks pretty odd, we have to agree, and is off-putting when you’re displaying a video in full screen, for example – and also losing some screen real estate for displaying a video clip.
As one user put this to Microsoft on Twitter (expletive removed): “Stop giving everything around the corner!”
We get it though – having adopted a round rather than a sharp edge as the overall look of Windows 11, Microsoft is just keeping things consistent. However, this seems a step too far, especially for the full-screen rounding aspect; but it’s still early testing and no doubt the idea will be further refined (or possibly abandoned based on feedback).