2. We always had those kind of "busy" UI since IE, Netscape, Opera and Firefox.
3. Chrome comes around, makes a very simplistic UI and now many people assume that it's the only way.
IMO Chrome is just too simplistic, It's beautiful yes but is it efficient? For example, the first thing I do when I install Firefox on a machine is to display the menu bar. And I think it's a shame there is no more status bar as well.
This is one of the most shameful things to have happened to Firefox. The status bar is core functionality. It should be included by default, and it should be enabled by default.
Now, if they really felt the need to play design games with the UI, they could have at least disabled the status bar by default, and allowed it to be quickly re-enabled (like can be done for the menus).
Forcing users to go through the hassle of installing an extension just to get back core functionality is truly unjustifiable and very shameful.
I think that for almost all Internet Explorer and Safari users the UI is as busy as their developers make it.
I expect the average user of Chrome and Firefox to be able and willing to at least get to the "View" menu (or similar) and configure the interface as he/she sees fit.
For almost all Firefox users, the UI is as busy as Mozilla makes it.