[Hurdy]

The old design will completely go away in the next few days. From a development perspective it's just not feasible to make everything work for two different designs (with many many themes). It's better to spend the time on cool new features.

[vidarh]

The only cool new feature I'd like would be a flag to make Google stop fucking with the UI.

[esc]

Thanks for the answer. Based on the discussion here, one especially cool new feature would be a 'classic' mode that would mimic the look and feel of the old design :)

[Hurdy]

It's not possible to please everyone when you do a UI change and have 300+ million users, but we do try to fix some issues people have with the new design (e.g. setting for text buttons, high contrast theme). Of course it has to look consistent with other products so there are some limitations. Our community manager wrote a much more eloquent answer to that topic on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/sk7i7/how_do_you_get...

[esc]

The link was an interesting read, and you make a valid point that some of the issues have been solved by features like the button texts.

Actually my point was exactly that everyone seems to have their own favorite thing they miss about the old design. So for me it would make more sense to build a mode (on top of the new codebase) that would mimic the old design instead of implementing fixes one-by-one. Then everyone who liked the old design better could just change one setting that is easy to find and be done instead of playing with bunch of individual settings in different menus to achieve the same thing. I think it would stop a lot of complaints even if it would not be perfect.

I understand that there might be very good reasons why it is not feasible, this is just my 2 cents.