Apparently "less" is "more" but why does that "less" take longer to load than before?
Seems to be the in thing, even Outlook suffers from this weird fad.
Lots of new UI paradigms floating around at the moment, latest one is called UCD (or user centred design) where developers survey a large number of users on how things should look until they get the results they want to hear. The end result can be called lipstick on a pig.