Death to Chips

2026-10-06 00:00:00 -0500

In UI design, there’s nothing I loathe more than everything being round. For some reason, there’s this pervasive idea that every corner must be shaved, and every edge must be curved. As if users might accidentally cut themselves on a dialog box. I’m tired of it.

I’m not exactly sure when this shift occurred, but I notice it every time I look at old screenshots from basically any device. Graphical programs, websites and online applications used to have rectangles. Now they have the dreaded “squircles”. Gmail, YouTube, and Discord once all had simple, rectangular designs that were functional. But it’s not just web design—Windows went the way of round corners with Windows 11, which if I’m honest is the least of its issues, but I won’t get into that. I’m convinced that next year Xerox will be printing copy paper with the corners rounded off, in an exercise of modern-design homogenization. It looks bad. I hate it.

The worst offender is the chip, also known as the “pill” or “tag”. The chip is the shape of a rectangle with its corners completely rounded off, leaving what is essentially two semicircles glued to the sides. Here are some examples:

And this is Firefox’s new design “Nova”, an example of chip hell:

Having a small label to represent an element chosen from a list was fine—just an icon with text—but now everything is a chip. Now my browser tabs, which once resembled the tabs of a folder, are chips. Search bars, which used to resemble a bar that spanned the width of a container, are chips, sanded off just in case someone runs their mouse pointer across its edge.

You know what popular website doesn’t have a single chip on its homepage? Wikipedia. Not only are there no circles on WP’s homepage, there aren’t even any rounded corners. Every container and section on the main page has four 90° angles. God bless you, Wikimedia Foundation. I’m sorry for what I said about Vector 2022. Even if it is an aesthetic downgrade from Vector 2010 in every single way, and removes all sense of depth and gravity from the site. And I’m sorry that you’re catching strays in my unrelated blog post. (I’m a complainer.)

tl;dr, I want rectangles back on the web, and I want death to chips.