Well, the main reason for the change is because the old visualizer style was Flash-based, and Adobe Flash will be completely phased out by 2020. Everything's being migrated over to HTTPS, so rather than wait until the last minute, Tom's getting a jump on things by switching us over to a new HTML5 audio player now.
Suffice to say, a lot has already changed since the site was initially 100% Flash-based and they need to bring things up to speed. I'm sure it's not particularly fun for them either, but if we want things that actually work in the future, some kind of change is needed.
I'm not sure if this is the final version of the audio player or not yet, but what I'm personally much more concerned about is that loops are no longer gapless. Odds are that the classic badgers and mushrooms will never return, but I loved those old-school visuals, too. For now though, if you want to see the previous visualizations, you can always drop tracks into a playlist. Those haven't changed...at least for now.
AED4
To be completely honest... I'm not a huge fan of the change.
Visually speaking it is a straight downgrade imo. Just displaying the waveform is boring and it kinda ruins the structural surprise. The visualizers made the AP so much more unique and interesting when comparing to other sites. And you had tons of different visualizers to choose from. And even then if you didn't like seeing visualizers you could switch on the spinning disc. Also the old player fitted the style of NG as whole perfectly, and it was just generally much more detailed
Also they removed the ability to change volume, now you can only mute it.
Honestly speaking I hope that they bring back the ability to switch back the visualizers... Now it looks just SC lite...
TaintedLogic
I totally agree. Hopefully they're just experimenting a little before settling on a long-term solution...maybe that's a bit optimistic, though.