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Well, that was a short-lived little treat. After finally showing up without flags necessary in ChromeOS 133, rounded window corners – a small-yet-significant visual change to the OS – has vanished with the update to ChromeOS 135. While it doesn’t change any real functionality for Chromebook users, there’s a definite step backwards with the look and feel of the overall OS with it gone.
This feature is one that has been in the works and behind feature flags for a while now, so for those who are a bit more adventurous, we’ve actually had rounded window corners as an option for quite some time on ChromeOS – reaching way back into the middle of last year.
However, we’ve only just recently had the official arrival, so its disappearance is very strange when you consider the timeline. After all, its not like Google hasn’t been experimenting with it for a very long time at this point. If you work on a feature for well over a year, why roll it out if it wasn’t quite ready? They could have just kept it behind a flag until things were settled and working as expected.
Either way, if you have any floating windows in ChromeOS 135 at the moment, those lovely, modern, rounded corners will not be there for now. I have to assume a bug showed up that needed to be fixed, but I’m not entirely sure what went wrong. For my part, I will say that I noticed a lack of rounding animation when you pulled a window from full-screen to floating that left the corners squared off until you dropped the window in place. And even then, there was no animation to go from non-radiused to radiused; it just popped back into a rounded corner shape and generally looked a bit unfinished.
Maybe that’s the thing that is getting fixed or maybe there was a bigger issue at play, here. We’re not sure at the moment, but for the time being, if you are missing those round edges and want them back (bugs or not), you can head to chrome://flags/#rounded-windows, enable the flag, restart, and you’ll be back to where we were in ChromeOS 134.
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