Finding random people on the internet to complain about change is as hard as finding grains of sand at the beach. The real question is what percentage of users will actually even notice a week after release, much less actually be inconvenienced in some measurable way.

The links were provided because these discussions contains arguments (good and bad), it was not about quantification.

Yeah, it's just that I remember people saying the same thing about Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, etc. (or each OS X release on the Mac side, since 10.1 or so – I think everyone agrees 10.0 was over the top).

Some people initially have strong negative reactions to something familiar changing but those tend go away quickly as the new version becomes familiar and then the same people will rant about the next version. Remember the “Fisher-Price My First OS” jokes when Windows XP came out? I'd bet you could find similar cracks at Windows 7 from some of the same people who are now saying the XP UI was the Platonic ideal of Windows.

ArsTechnica actually did the legwork looking through their forums when the now-staunchly-defended Windows XP was approaching EOL:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04 /memory-lane-before-everyone-loved-windows-xp-they-hated-it/

The author described Windows 10 as 'kind of gorgeous', which was somewhat surprising. Until now the most generous thing I've heard someone say is that it's not finished. (Seriously, though, the UI is very unpolished at this stage, even for Windows. I wouldn't be concerned if not for the fact that RTM is only a few months away.)

It's actually a UX improvement: a lead designer at Microsoft talked about how "people aren't squares" in a recent blog post [1]. I'm not sure it looks that great, but once you know the logic behind it it's a lot more interesting.

[1]: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/29/windows-...

My rebuttal is that an account ID picture is not necessarily a portrait photograph. Oh, sure, social data miners like Facebook want you to only use a photo of yourself for a profile picture. But many people -- such as on Twitter -- don't.

Profile pictures I've used are a photo of my computer, a still from a movie, an animated GIF of a flying pig (alas no one I know of supports animated profile pictures), and yes even a photo of myself every once in a while.

That said, complaining about the shape of the profile picture is pure bikeshedding. Big deal. How much time on your computer do you spend staring at your own picture? (Please don't answer that.) Although if given the choice I'd prefer rectangular. My computer screen is a rectangle. The area reserved to display the picture is a rectangle. Does a click in the invisible rectangle register as part of the picture? And most of all, it's easier to crop a photo to appear circular when displayed in a rectangle than it is to show a rectangle inside a circle. So the "safe" default should be a rectangle.

If they were being honest, the actual reason is that circular avatars have been trendy and the norm for new designs on the web, iOS, and Android for the past 3 to 4 years, and the two primary reasons they became popular were because border-radius became supported widely enough around that time, and because photographs of faces arguably look better in a circular frame, at least according to current tastes.

Here's a quora thread from back in 2013 discussing it:

http://www.quora.com/Why-are-many-UI-designers-using-round-p...