If I ran Cnet I'd be very suspicious of having someone so damned lazy, a child with the "are we there yet?" mentality, on my payroll.
There's a couple of IE looking skins available to help ease the Hellish torment of transition.
(The flag background I learned how to add much later, and here I am to tell the tale, ain't that sumpin'?)
CNet is a weird site. It's biased, though not always leftward, but unlike most sites (like Wired) it delivers despite its biases. I've never seen this Molly person writing for them before, so I'm guessing they did this as a change-up just to spur some traffic.