ChromeOS to implement rounded corners for devices with rounded screens

Ahh, rounded display corners. A remnant from the CRT days that is suddenly cool and modern again. Maybe Rust Cohle from True Detective was right when he said, “Time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” To that end, if you look carefully at your smartphone’s display, chances are that it has rounded corners. Similarly, for recently released Chromebooks, that seems to be the aesthetic manufacturers are also going for.

As spotted by Chrome Story, a new feature flag has appeared in the Chromium Repository that will enable rounded corners for the internal display. The discovery is timely considering that the new Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 and the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 360 both have displays with rounded corners, and Google would definitely want to make sure the operating system matches that look. The curve of the screen matches the curve of the outside of the device, and now with this flag enabled, your application corners will also match. It just gives it a more modern and put-together look. The commit states that the flag will be named #rounded-display and is described as follows:

// Enables the rounded corners for the internal display.
const base::Feature kRoundedDisplay{“RoundedDisplay”,
base::FEATURE_DISABLED_BY_DEFAULT};

Windows 11 and macOS follow this same trend where the edges of application windows are rounded off. The look has become so popular that third-party applications have been developed to artificially give a corner radius to devices with sharp display corners.

This isn’t ChromeOS’ first foray into rounded corners, as there is already a flag available that gives Picture-in-Picture windows that same look (#ash-enable-pip-rounded-corners). Designers use rounded corners so often nowadays that they’ve become more of an industry standard than a design choice, not to mention that they are easier on your eyes, according to some experts. However, we’ll have to wait for the flag to show up in the Canary channel before we can check out how the ChromeOS implementation will work out. Nevertheless, I’m very excited to see the results.