Personally I'm glad they resist efforts to "improve" the site. I'm tired of the slippery slope of fast and information-dense sites becoming slow and information-sparse. Just my opinion, don't shoot me.
I had no idea seeing this black bar meant a death. I thought it meant a rendering error and gave a half second to reload the page, say hunh it's still there, and go on to something else. I came away with the impression somebody got design-y and changed things up for no real reason.
Edit: and for all the talk on this page about the bar, very little is being said about the man. Here's his Wikipedia page for anybody interested:
But that presupposes you know this black bar indicates someone's death, which is not the case of the person asking the question in the first place.