The Changing Amazon

I'm sure I'm the last to notice this, but it looks like Amazon.com has done a pretty extensive redesign of their site. The ultimate useful site from the popular design book Don't Make Me Think! has made a major change to the tab-driven design that originally made the site so easy to navigate. They do acknowledge that their difficulty in designing their sight in a usable way stems from their expansion to over 40 categories of goods sold on their site. The new site, still in a testing, or beta, phase, does away with the old all-tabbed navigation and opts for a tidy pull-down menu.

I did take 2 minutes to look at the source code of the navigation elements of the pages, and it looks like a pure CSS and JavaScript pop-down menu. All of the elements are always present, and JavaScript changes the display attributes on mouse events. I'm sure you get the picture without me explaining it. In case you're interested, here's a cool example of a menu you can create with CSS and JavaScript.

We'll see how this affects Amazon's status as the most usable major Marketplace website out there. What will their customers and partners think?