the good things about this new interface
- user interface has been designed to mimic the look of 'widgets' on windows vista desktop or apple's mac os x desktop- this i believe in itself is not necessarily a good thing- the point is that this approach segregates [or 'segments'] the interface elements into distinct units, thus providing clarity
- addition of nifty little features [though no 'big' feature]
the bad things about this new interface
- more resource intensive, and thus noticeably slower on slower computers [and especially on web browsers like mozilla firefox]
- although 'segmentation' plays its part in providing cleanliness to the interface, the individual segments themselves are more 'filled' [or 'stuffed'], and thus the overall complexity of this new interface is [to me] higher than the old interface
- on 800x600 displays, scroll bars are forced, rather than a 'reflow', thus hiding the rightmost portions of page all the time
my belief is that though the new look does have many little improvements, some of which are nice too, it also has an increased overall complexity, and those users who have liked it have probably liked it because of it being different from the previous interface, rather than because of it being substantially (and absolutely) better.
finally, users with 1024x768 or larger displays and high speed computers will remain shielded from the more annoying ill-effects of this new interface, and so are more likely to like and appreciate this new interface, at least initially
