You see, I like to freep occasionally at my cubicle at work. The old FR was very clean, so it made it a lot less obvious that it was 'not work'. This design is obviously 'not work'.
Plus, cleaner designs are always more successful designs. Go to the Yahoo home page. Lots of links, very clean, no graphics, maximum use of space with little by way of glitz. Yahoo is one of the most successful pages on the web. Drudge report is another example: Plain font, many links, very clean. It is visited daily by more than 1,000,000 people.
I do not predict that FR will have the growth that it used to have. And I will reluctantly be forced to stay away during work hours at least.
This screen looks a lot less like, "work," than the old FR....#8-(
We'll see.
There was a move afoot a while ago to provision people to be able to "skin" their view of FR as they preferred. I wish it were so now!