One of several reasons why the new design was unintuitive was that the use of a 'darker' button for the focused page was at odds with the previous design, but more importantly, was at odds with Apple's other tabbed applications such as Mail, Preview, Pages, Numbers, etc. In all of these it is the lightest tab that is in focus.
I would prefer to see improvements to the display and management of bookmarks, including a 'separator' feature. Hotkey-triggered overlay for bookmarks or history would be very helpful and would save the space taken up by the bookmarks bar.