Actually this is pretty much a review of the address bar. I don't know who designs this stuff but... Ugh! I'm more of a coder than a UI guy and there's no way I would let some of this stuff happen in my project.
There is a little border between the favicon and the URL in the address bar. To me, it now always looks like the cursor is in the address bar when the address bar is empty. This is rather annoying.
The little green arrow in the address bar that functions as a "go" button... First, there are no cues that it is clickable at all, it should react in some way on mouoseover*. Second, after you hit it (and receive no feedback that the click did anything), sometime during the page load process, it is replaced with the "add bookmark" star while a page is loading. I have already clicked "add bookmark" by accident while trying to re-hit the "go" button due to lack of feedback that the click worked.
The "enhanced" address bar drop-down... Now each entry is twice as tall (page title above line with URL in a smaller font), so seeing the auto-complete suggestions is messy and inefficient. Why?
When a page fails to load and you get the error page, the "add bookmark" star does not change back to the "go" arrow. Why?
So I wonder. Were people *asking* for these "features"? I doubt it. Where did they come from? These things reek of crappy old ways of doing things. Some high-ranking person dreams up these idiotic ideas and gets them implemented them while the actual queue of things that should be implemented is ignored. That's just a guess but I can't imagine any of these "features" being asked for, and I also can't imagine them testing well if they do any focus groups or user testing.
In my next installment, I'll be reviewing the "back" and "forward" buttons. Just kidding, I didn't really intend this article to have such a narrow focus but they really messed up one important component...
* - okay, i just noticed that the arrow itself changes color slightly on mouseover. its barely noticable on my laptop.