But why

Microsoft Metro Design fan?

My gripe with border-radius is that it makes everything look the same.

I'd really like more corner types. Back in the tables and sliced images days, we'd have all manner of neat angular borders, and tons of variety. Now it's all squircles everywhere.

Apparently made by Twitter handle @getifyX: https://x.com/getifyX/status/1935001870658851288

My contribution to the genre: negative border radius Let's make the (digital) world sharper

https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1846417247075459235

If we’re going to fuck something, it should be something more consequential like JIRA.

https://ifuckinghatejira.com/

I know it's overused and for example in MacOS introduces way too much white space, but people like rounded shapes. They make people more comfortable and make them think the content is simpler than when they get hard angles. It's been tested in so many research papers and the basically all agree - people like bouba more than kiki, whatever the context is.

Border radius has been one of the best things to happen to CSS. If you've done web development during the Internet Explorer 6 era, you'd know what I mean.

   <table><tr><td><img src="top-left-corner.gif" ....

Open devtools and add `html * { border-radius: 6px; }` to make this site look lovely.

Everything in the real world is rounded to some degree. If anything, it's more weird that boxes on a screen should be the exception.

I mean, the very bible of all things usability has redesigned its website and they put rounded corners almost everywhere.

https://www.nngroup.com/

Ninety-degree angles do not exist in nature. So you're going to get two schools of thought: UI should look more natural (and therefore round off any hard edges), or UI should intentionally embrace hard edges, as a declaration of defiance against entropy, just like any other human endeavor for industry, progress, stability, and reliability.

We used to build systems that we wished would stand the test of time. Now we build systems that only last as long as PMs care about them and their warranty period runs out. What do our design choices say about us?

I wonder whether they want to fuck the Fernández–Guasti squircle, Lamé's special quartic, or both, and whether their desires extend to higher-dimensional sphubes. Possibly their squigonometry just can't handle such curves, and they can't control themself!

Is there a Bresenham-style algorithm similar to the midpoint algorithm for roundrects that can produce other kinds of squircles?

We like border radius, because we were forced to.