https://web.archive.org/web/20140123124247/http://www.apache... <-- Only thing missing is here is the dial-up connection
The new design is nice looking, but I just checked and to download the portable version I am filtered through to the sourceforge.net page for the project, which I never enjoyed navigating. It's not that difficult, but it's more laborious that the direct link that used to be on the downloads page.
Their download page is also very unclear at the moment. You don't know which link is 1.8.2 and which 1.8.3 without hovering over the link. How did that sneak by?
Unfortunately, I am required to code on a windows machine for my current 9 to 5, so I am fairly limited as to what tools I have to get a LAMP stack up and running quickly and locally. So, XAMPP is my homie for now and it's site is one I kick around from time to time, especially when trying to figure out how to turn off AsychDNS in the curl library (yea... you have to rebuild the lib... fun stuff).
Regarding the download pages, I feel the versioning makes sense if you assume the higher XAMPP version correlates to the higher PHP version, which makes sense to me.