One man's cruft is another's compatibility. Webword once carried and article which said the 4 most visited sites in the USA were AOL / Time Warner, Microsoft, Yahoo! or Napster (before the record companies nobbled Napster), these four companies define users' expectations of what web sites should be like, and the rest of us should follow their lead rather than bang our heads on a brick wall (“The Four Horsemen of Usability” at http://www.webword.com/moving/fourhorsemen.html). Removing cruft from UIs is tricky becasue it's likely to contradict users' expectations.