User blog comment:BertH/Layout and navigation updates coming October 3/@comment-188432-20120919230221/@comment-957747-20120920002312

All of our features go through a trial period. The old navigation has ended theirs. If you look at the stats in Special:WikiFeatures, the Expanded Wiki Navigation is the highest (by far) in number of wikis using it (over 150k out of 250k wikis). That's 60% of all wikis using the new navigation.

Compare that to the popularity of the other features listed there. Achievements, while popular, are only enabled on 85k wikis. Chat sits at 18k and Message wall at 11k. The comparison is uncanny.

Not only that, but the new navigation allows for more flexibility and links and automatically follows the themes color scheme from the Theme Designer.