The old design was very much in line with the rest of Google’s products, but it had its flaws:

It was hard to tell what category you were looking at (especially if you have many tabs open). The search box and menu bar were too small for my taste. There wasn’t enough contrast between text and background color. It looked like an unfinished product that hadn’t received any attention since 2010 or so. I always felt like I needed to squint when reading text on the page because there wasn’t enough contrast between black and white colors (this is especially true for dark themes)
https://t.co/Qj27Ca6e5x