⇥ The world through square eyes

Rounded corners are everywhere… except for Internet Explorer, even after fourteen years.

A while back, I came across a story on Andy Hertzfeld’s folklore.org, a site which collects stories and anecdotes from the early years of the Macintosh project. Folklore is a great read—at the most basic level, it’s a window into the minds of one of the most successful computer teams in history.

One of the most interesting stores is appropriate titled “Round Rects Are Everywhere!” and talks about how rectangles with rounded corners made into the initial version of Mac OS (let me spare you the suspence—like every story that sounds crazy on the surface, they were the result of Steve Jobs getting obsessed over a detail). Perhaps the most interesting bit from the article is this quote, attributed to the Chief Madman himself:

“Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!”

Boy, was he right then, and would he be right now, weren’t he busy making millions by selling us Jesus Phones. As I look around my living room, or my office, or my bedroom, I do not see any straight corners. In fact, even those that look like straight corners are, upon closer inspection, subtly rounded.

The human brain associates rounded corners with safety, comfort and “fluffiness.” Though there seems to be considerable disagreement on the reason why, I think just about everyone will find rounded corners pleasant and easy on the eye—in fact, research indicates that there is a synaesthetic relationship between rounded shapes and other cognitive concepts that  humans associate with softness and harmlessness. In short, humans like rounded corners. It’s that simple.

Research and reason notwithstanding, it’s a fact that rounded corners have been prevalent in web design for many years now. Everyone does it—it is such an important feature that no graphics editor can be without a rounded-rectangle drawing implement, and every web designer realizes their importance and is all-too-familiar with how difficult they can be to implement in older browsers*.

Well, not quite.

Wait, did I say older browsers? Sorry, it must have been a slip of the tongue, because only some modern browsers have long caught on with reality and implemented a method for rendering rounded corners without requiring JavaScript hacks or (even worse, because you need to have someone make and slice individual images) individual pictures of each corner. Heck, even the CSS consortium, whose layout model seems to have been inspired by Ray Charles, has finally adopted what has essentially been available to Webkit and Gecko users for years.

The only people that have been left out in the cold are Internet Explorer users. The only reason Microsoft has publicly given for this massive oversight in one of their most important products boils down to the fact that, basically, the CSS3 standard was not complete as of the time that IE8 came out. That doesn’t seem to have stopped Microsoft from offering proprietary features before, but it’s somehow stopped them from offering one that almost every website uses.

Excuses aside, there is a real risk for IE in this relatively unimportant capability: Microsoft is turning its browser into an outcast in the designer community. Even with its still-massive market share, IE has become known as the Browser That is Difficult to Work With. Designers today can, and do, get away with charging their customers a premium to support older versions of IE—and web design has evolved to the point where graceful degradation is a perfectly valid practice. The result: Firefox and Safari users get rounded corners, while IE users get straight edges. Beautiful and pleasant on one set of browsers, not so much on another.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this problem is going to be exacerbated by today’s need for a tight and efficient application design cycle—when you change any aspect of a design element through CSS and your only alternative to support IE is a cumbersome process that requires additional time and slows down development, even the beancounters are going to say that straight corners look good enough for IE and let them be.

Once enough of that happens, users are bound to notice that their user experience is subtly inferior in IE—not so much so that the sites they visit won’t work or be useful, but just enough so that other browsers will simply look better. I wonder if that is going to eventually make IE a second-class citizen and cause it to lose even more market share.

• Of course, it occurred to me, while writing this post, that my blog’s theme has straight corners. The irony is not lost, I assure you—and it shall be corrected soon, especially now that my understanding of WordPress templating has gone beyond the retching stage.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client of both MTA and Blue Parabola.

Photo credit: Square Eyes by Sara G.