Edit: Looks like you can opt-out of that “new look and feel” pretty easily under the appearance settings but still, whats with putting rounded corners everywhere?
Edit 2: “Explore the web with a softer, more friendly aesthetic featuring rounded corners […] Designed to complement your operating system, whether on Windows 11, MacOS, or Linux.” The fuck does that mean? Windows 11 fair enough but most Linux distros don’t look like that at all.
The real mildlyinfuriating part is that they probably got inspired by Arc, a relatively new browser. They already copied how their window splitting works.
Pretty crappy for MS not to have good designers themselves and then copy (often poorly) what one of the small players is doing.
Have you ever looked at MS’s business plan over their lifetime? This is nothing new.
Rounded edges have been a trend in UX design for a while now. It’s not really a concept that they need to have stolen from anyone else.