Google's New Favicon: Not My Favorite

At the end of last week, Google made a small change that's been bugging me a little ever since. It changed its favicon -- the little "favorites icon" graphic that displays in the address bar and bookmarks or favorites menus of most browsers -- to a new, much more colorful design.

This is the second time Google has changed this, and I'm not sure why. Last summer, its favicon was a simple, blue, capital-letter "G" set in a white square and had been so for the last eight and a half years. But in June, that shifted to a lower-case "g," in about the same shade of blue but without any background. Why? In a blog post, Google vice president Marissa Mayer and web designer Micheal Lopez explained:

The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we've also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.

Now things have changed yet again -- the lower-case g has gone in for a paint job. It now appears in white inside a set of color fields matching the red, yellow, green and blue of the characters in Google's logo. (The graphic at right includes blown-up examples of the old and new icons.) Why another change? Google's Mayer and Lopez posted a new item on its blog, saying that it responded to all the people who sent in new favicon ideas after its last change:

We were impressed by the volume of submissions we received, and today we are happy to introduce a new Google favicon inspired by those submissions by our users.

Much as I hate to critique a choice as personal as one's online heraldry, this new icon just doesn't do much for me. It's too loud, and the outlined "g" drowns too easily between those colored icebergs. (Note that in the winning submission, the "g" appears at the center of the icon, but Google then elected to shift it to the left.) And if the color fields remind me of anything, it's South Africa's flag, not Google -- which, after all, doesn't have any blocks of color in its logo, just a series of letters.

I'm not the only one disappointed by the change; see, for instance, the skeptical reaction at the Google Operating System blog. How about you? Does this change bug you at all? Or had you not noticed it until reading this post?