If you're a Firefox user like me, and you find the new notification bar distracting, it's quite easy to get rid of. Just find your user style sheet (it's called userContent.css, and it's located in the chrome folder inside your Firefox profile folder), and add the following lines of code:

@-moz-document domain(twitter.com) {
	div#new_results_notification {
		display: none !important;
	}
}

If userContent.css doesn't exist, just create it. Restart Firefox, and the notification bar should be gone. You will still be able to see your unread tweet count in the page title, though.

(I wrote about userContent.css (in Dutch) when it was first introduced in 2005)