Gmail has finally forced the new design on me, and there appears to be no way to revert back.  It’s tricky to separate style changes (highly subjective) from usability tweaks, but I really feel that the new design is a huge step backward in usability.

One case in point:  stars (flags) for messages.  They’ve been moved to the right side, so they now appear like this:

This is a less important place on the page — we read left to right, scanning the sender and subject first.  The star’s function is to mark the most important messages, so it should be in an important place (on the left).  Even worse, they’re not even aligned anymore because of the “reply” button, creating more visual work to locate the stars.  Why is this an improvement?

Also, the left rail has now been replaced with a person-info icon that you can hover over and click to expand messages, completely redundant with clicking or hovering over the sender’s name.  Why?

Worse, they show the person-info hover dialog for my own emails.  Why?