You know that "smiley style chooser" in the lower right corner of Gmail chat windows? It has three choices: stylized black&white smileys, and two options with yellow distracting gaphichs in the style of MSN or "Yahoo!" Messenger (in my humble opinion). Until recently, it allowed you to choose what sort of emoticons you _see_ on your screen.

For example, if I have black&white option selected, and my chat partner has yellow square one, until recently, we would both write ":-)", I would see it rotate pi/2, and he would see it rotate, get a square contour and change color to yellow.

But lately, if I chat with the same partner, I would see my nice black&white smileys in _my_ chat lines, but when my partner types ":-)", I'd see in his message an ugly yellow blob which distracts my attention and makes chat practically unusable.

Now, I think I understand why Gmail team made this change; the same reason Gmail got "Delete" button, despite almost nobody needed it: people expected the chooser to function that way. I understand that. What I don't understand is how could they such nonchallantly remove the main reason many people chose Google Talk and Gmail Chat over Yahoo or MSN Messenger: clean and non-distracting interface for communication.

What do you think? Do you find yellow screaming smileys distracting in chats, especially if you chat about serious things (local compactness of topological spaces, for example;)?

I don't think it's that bad. You save a little bandwidth if you don't load the other emoticons sets.
And when I'm on chat I don't find them distracting, they add expression to the conversation. In serious (formal) conversations there's no reason to use emoticons, in my opinion...

I mostly use Meebo so I get the yellow things anyway. But I do prefer the text ones.