New Google Favicon Deja Vu All Over Again? 227
theodp writes "Last June, Google rolled out a new favicon, the small branding icon that graces your URL bar when you visit Google. Which, as it turned out, bore a striking similarity to Garth Brooks' Circle-G logo. Well, Google went back to the drawing board and has come back with a new favicon, which it says was inspired by — not copied from, mind you — its users' submitted ideas. Some are also seeing inspiration elsewhere for the new favicon, which consists of white 'g' on a background of four color swatches. Take the AVG antivirus icon, for instance. Or everybody's favorite memory toy, Simon. Or — in perhaps the unkindest cut of all — the four-color Microsoft Windows logo, shown here with a superimposed white '7'. Anything else come to mind?" What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.
Really, timothy? (Score:5, Insightful)
What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.
You mean like the Slashdot editors who think it's important enough to put on the front page?
Re:Really, timothy? (Score:5, Funny)
News for NERDS. Yes, we (the nerds) care about such things. Pedantic is our middle name.
Re:Really, timothy? (Score:5, Funny)
My middle name is Clive, you insensitive clod!
Re:Really, timothy? (Score:5, Funny)
My middle name is Clive, you insensitive clod!
Anonymous Clive Coward? :P
Your parents didn't like you very much, did they?
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You know when your comrades are using very very small monitors when three screenfulls of yours takes up 12 of theirs.
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News just in (Score:5, Funny)
... the "S" in Slashdot looks similar to the "S" in MicroSoft!
Unpossible (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unpossible (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly! And judging by the way the editors are posting this crap purely to get pagehits, it's safe to call it $la$hdot.
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No, this is Slashdot, we spell Micro$oft differently.
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What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.
You mean like the Slashdot editors who think it's important enough to put on the front page?
Well, I noticed it first thing this morning when I started my workstation.
Personally I think it's damn ugly -- which surprised me for Google.
Maybe I'll put a custom one in my userChrome.css.
Re:Really, timothy? (Score:5, Funny)
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What do you expect (Score:2)
OK - for the 21st century (Score:2)
Oh boy. It's 2009 and we're still judging women by paper-baggedness. :(
OK, I'll update it for the 21st century: I could probably give Miriam one without wearing my VR goggles.
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And Ubuntu isn't ugly if your relative look is the Sun Java Desktop, hey look we manage to make Gnome look like crap! [sun.com]
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I was actually wondering what spyware might have been messing with my CSS files to give google such a strange logo.
Also, why are RGBY Google's colors? It seems like every company has used those colors at some point or another. Everyone knows that google's colors are white and, somewhat reluctantly, blue.
Re:Really, timothy? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, why are RGBY Google's colors?
I have absolutely no idea. [google.com]
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Fake. Google never looked like that.
Re:Really, timothy? (Score:5, Insightful)
why does it surprise you? have you never been to google.com or seen the official Google logo?
from the very start Google's used clashing primary colors with a homely serif font for their official logo [onewebday.org]. at first i thought it looked tacky & unprofessional (and it was), but over time it's grown on me. it's kinda refreshing to have a major IT company whose site doesn't have the stereotypical cold/sterile corporate look. sure, Google's logo comes off as very candid and a little bit childish, but it also elicits a warm & cheerful feelings.
something that's very sleek & glossy or highly-stylized just wouldn't fit with Google's familiar spartan (and slightly offbeat) image. i mean, if you look at Google's web services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, etc., they all have fairly plain and simple layouts. their designs are functional and modest. this is in stark contrast with the flashy, and often cluttered, web pages of companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and the popular early search portals.
it's a little ironic as Google is primarily an advertising company, but they don't have that 'multi-million-dollar marketing budget' look. this probably contributes to their popularity as Google's web services aren't as intimidating to non-geeks and computer novices who may be turned off by the slick interfaces and flashy layouts other sites strive for.
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Yeah, the user submitted one looks much better than this offset g.
I'm not really seeing the similarity (Score:5, Insightful)
The Garth Brooks one is particularly ridiculous---the only similarity appears to be that both have, at various times, used a lowercase 'g' in an entirely unremarkable font as a logo. Yes, congratulations, two instances of a lowercase 'g' can look similar!
The rest aren't much more convincing. Google uses some simple arrangements of primary colors, and, amazingly enough, so do some other companies, even some other tech companies. But they don't even look particularly similar (especially the Windows one).
Re:I'm not really seeing the similarity (Score:5, Insightful)
Google uses some simple arrangements of primary colors, and, amazingly enough, so do some other companies, even some other tech companies. But they don't even look particularly similar (especially the Windows one).
Not to you, slashdotter, who sees these logos all the time. To the casually stroller-by, who sees tech logos once per fortnight, they will easily be confused. What is red, green, and blue and deals with computers? If today it is AVG / Google / MS and tomorrow it is something else then there _will_ be confusion and brand dilution.
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Not to you, slashdotter, who sees these logos all the time. To the casually stroller-by, who sees tech logos once per fortnight, they will easily be confused. What is red, green, and blue and deals with computers? If today it is AVG / Google / MS and tomorrow it is something else then there _will_ be confusion and brand dilution.
The letter g might be confused with the letter g? Say it aint so!
Re:I'm not really seeing the similarity (Score:5, Funny)
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Today's episode of /. is brought to you by the letter g
Fixed that for you. Remember, URLs are case sensitive!
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Unless they're on an IIS box/shed. In which case case-sensitivity goes out the window.
Re:I'm not really seeing the similarity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm not really seeing the similarity (Score:5, Informative)
It is my opinion that the favicons for a site are very important for recognition (e.g. for completion in the URL bar) for the average user.
Favicons are not necessarily tiny actually. Konqueror has the feature (that I like very much) to set the favicon as the application icon. That has the nice effect that in your pager (the virtual desktop manager in the ) the window area is filled with the favicon. Very nice for switching desktops to the right browser window.
Thirdly, I use http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/27548 [userscripts.org]
It helped me to completely block out that google changed their favicon to an ugly one I can't associate with their website and I can live in my tiny world where they didn't.
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When it changed, I for one thought my browser was being hijacked.
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Yup,
there's a real danger of confusing the biggest internet search engine with Garth Brooks ranch..
Imagine the disasters that might occur!
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You forgot Yellow
Re:I'm not really seeing the similarity (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. When you get down to minimalist, iconic designs, at favicon resolution, there is only so much parameter space. One of those links claims:
Give me a break! Newsflash: any icon can be conceptually transformed into any other icon in a finite number of image-manipulation steps. Like: "Slashdot favicon + Convert to B&W + Duplicate the slash 3 times + flip two of the slashes -> Wikipedia's favicon" ... OMG! Wikipedia is stealing ideas from Slashdot!
The summary is so patently ridiculous that I really have to wonder if it was submitted as a joke or is an attempt to troll Slashdot. Google's new favicon has a "g" and 4 primary colors. It bears some resemblance to other 4-primary-color emblems (of which there are thousands). Get over it.
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The summary is so patently ridiculous that I really have to wonder if it was submitted as a joke or is an attempt to troll Slashdot.
You just had to say "patently" in the context of this thread didn't you?
PS - to you smartasses, yes I know there's a difference between trademarks, copyrights, patents, etc.
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A lowercase 'g' in two entirely different, unremarkable fonts.
Re:I'm not really seeing the similarity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I agree that this whole thing seems a little nit-picky. It's pretty hard to design a good logo. Ask a designer, and many will say that they find it to be one of the hardest things to design, since they should usually be extremely simple designs, immediately identifiable, and wrap up a lot of meaning into a single impression.
It's even harder to create an logo that doesn't resemble any other logo. You can't really do it. Art in general takes from prior works, even if only stylistically, and nothing is entirely original. People are usually inspired by something, or draw an idea from someone else's work. Besides that, like I said, logos should usually be pretty simple, and if you make a million designs, all of them extremely simple, then every design will resemble at least a couple of the others.
Knowing all that, consider the form of the favicon. They're 16px by 16px, and IIRC some browsers only support 8-bit graphics (256 colors, no alpha channel). That's going to narrow your options a bit.
Also, using multiple primary colors are popular in logos. They stand out, and can be used to convey a childish simplicity (fun) or an elemental nature of the product. Using a single letter or only a couple letters is popular in logos-- I don't think I need to explain why. When you put this all together, it would be amazing if lots of favicons didn't resemble each other in various ways.
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It's even harder to create an logo that doesn't resemble any other logo. You can't really do it.
Sometimes they don't even try. Go look up the work of Saul Bass: he loved blue, especially blue circles: AT&T "Deathstar", Minolta, and Continental Airlines being three examples of logos that were obviously part of the same thought.
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16px * 16px * 256 colors = 65536 favicons. A lot of them looks like shit.
Typing "number of companies united states" into my firefox awesomebar takes me to http://www.manta.com/mb [manta.com], which claims it has "over 13 million company profiles for businesses in the United States." I think there may be an additional company or two in Europe, Asia and Oceania, and there might be a few non-commercial websites.
Not all of those has a web page, and not all of those who do has a favicon, but...
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Pretty much every browser supports using 32-bit-color PNGs for favicons, so your number of unique ones is quite low. Let's see... oh, my calculator overflowed just trying to calculate all possible unique favicons in the actual constraints.
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There's another problem in that calculation, too. Though the favicons are potentially limited to 256 colors, they don't have to be the same 256 colors from one icon to another. Since there are only 256 pixels in a 16x16 icon, you'd think that would be enough (it's enough for each pixel to be a different color).
The problem, rather, is the lack of an alpha channel. In order to make a logo that small look good, the logo either has to be pretty simple, or you have to use antialiasing. You don't really want
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It's not like they even put a broken circle around it or anything (I guess the Garth Brooks one looks like a record player?).
People need to give it a rest. There is very little creative you can do for a company logo in 16x16 pixels.
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I don't care who Google stole the icon from. I'm concerned with how much carbon Google is using transmitting that favico! [slashdot.org] (Historical context for future viewers, or for humor-impaired mods from the present: there is currently one story between that story and this one on the slashdot main page.)
Hardcore Slashdotters won't notice... (Score:5, Funny)
...because lynx does not support favicons, you insensitive clod!
Re:Hardcore Slashdotters won't notice... (Score:5, Funny)
...because lynx does not support favicons, you insensitive clod!
Lynx!?
Real hackers just stick the UTP on their tongue and decipher the signals with their taste buds. SIDE NOTE: I once discovered the hard way that a telephone ring signal is 90vac.
On a related note, I have been storing all of my favorites on the bookmark bar (or whatever it is called). As more sites are using the "favicon", it has been helpful to just edit the bookmark and remove the title altogether (leaving just the icon). You can fit a lot of favorites in the toolbar in this manner.
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That's rad, thanks for the tip. I never thought of doing it that way.
Makes me wonder if browsers will use favicons in a more prominent way in the future. A SVG favicon could scale up into all sorts of UI elements.
Re:Hardcore Slashdotters won't notice... (Score:5, Informative)
There is also a firefox addon which lets you pick your own favicons. I've got my whole bar filled with every site i'll ever need that way. :D
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Sometimes I can't recall what the site was about even after I read the bookmark. How am I supposed to remember all those favicons? But, of course, if you've only meant fitting more bookmarks in the same place -- valid point.
Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
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Fishing for emotional validation. (Score:5, Insightful)
What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.
Maybe editors are so hard up for pageviews that they'll post whatever inconsequential slop comes to mind, and internet users are just so hard up for interesting news that they'll comment on whatever garbage the editors feed them.
If the tech sites puked out story after story about motherfucking lolcats apparently Timothy would take the comments to indicate mass obsession with them, which, shit... bad example.
But seriously, who is actually obsessed with Google's favicon and who is just bored?
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No no ... really I came here hoping there would be something about this.
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Tsk tsk, this is Slashdot you know.
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Personally I want to know why a flamebait comment can't also be insightful, even if I think my above comment was more stating the obvious.
News is slow and Ars Technica has already declared the death of internet advertising. Those editors need to keep the content flowing before the gravy train derails.
One of the reasons is dont like to use icons.... (Score:2, Interesting)
is that all the idiotic designers think GUIs are a playground. From 1988 to 1995 Icons changed only marginally with time, but since the web-culture has spoiled the idea of consistent, clean UIs, i prefer to turn on the icon name whereever possible.
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a small additional note:
it is especially annoying that nowadays there are a lot of "circular icons, where some kind of arrow or direction indicator hides a letter or a circular sign which carries a letter". These take a lot of space, and force you to remember the color which is which if you wan to click fast.
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E.g. click on the preinstalled dearch bar in firefox.
creative commons, amazon, ask, google have a dominant circle-like feature
Almost Identical to Printing Company in Austin (Score:4, Interesting)
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If by a direct copy, you mean both have the letter g, then yes. yes you are right.
Re:Almost Identical to Printing Company in Austin (Score:5, Funny)
Damn! You caught me!
You see, I'm Google's brand designer. I was totally stumped when they told me they wanted a new logo, but then I thought: hey! There's that printing company in Austin!
I didn't think anybody would see the connection! *sob*
Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
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How about a big truck? This is the Internet, after all.
Obssession. (Score:2)
What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.
I'm always amazed at the sheer number of people that are obssessed, period. It seems to be a mark of distinction nowadays if you're just completely gaga about some particular product or brand (Apple owners come to mind, for some reason.) Well, unreason seems to be a defining characteristic of modern civilization, so I guess this should come as no surprise. Too bad psychiatrists are so expensive: there are a lot of folks that could use a little therapy.
Looks Like a Paw. Brings to mind Pet Supplies. (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like a blotch of random colors. I had no idea there was a lowercase "g" in it until I read the article here.
IMHO, the old favicon was much better - knew right away what it was. A bunch of random colors brings to mind websites about photoshopping, psychology (think blotch tests), or even a pet supply site, since it looks kinda like a paw print.
Ron
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Even after reading the article it took me a long time to see the 'g' in there.
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Looks like a red-beaked parrot to me (Score:2, Funny)
Looks like a red-beaked parrot to me.
You're right, it is an inkblot test. And apparently I have some repressed issues with parrots.
Re:Looks Like a Paw. Brings to mind Pet Supplies. (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. For the first few days I kept noticing the new favicon for google and wondering in my head "Why is google putting up a jumble of random shapes for their favicon?" I had assumed it was like the anniversary of some grand puzzle maker or something. Only yesterday did it suddenly hit me "OH that's a g!"
Terrible logo. In the middle it's at least legible.
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Yeah, thats pretty much along the lines of what I was thinking. Even after reading in this thread that there is a 'g' in there, I couldn't see it at all. :-/
Firefox's addressbar background color is white
The favicon wouldn't be all that bad if they would just put a dark colored border around the edges.
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I only noticed the new favicon yesterday. I only noticed the previous one a month ago! I should file that as a cache problem in the browser :)
The new logo is just plain yuk. Took me a while to register what it was, too. I was reaching or my phishing filters, actually.
Re:Looks Like a Paw. Brings to mind Pet Supplies. (Score:4, Interesting)
The original (the old old) logo was way better. And the favicon they did is worse than the one they got the inspiration from.
I don't get it, why do they keep changing it? I thought forming a brand meant keeping the same recognizable logo as long as you could, not arbitrarly changing it every 6 months!
Bring back old logo (Score:5, Insightful)
The original (the old old) logo was way better.
Amen to that. I thought I was the only one that thought the original blue G on white background was great. It was simple, clean and unmistakable. Now it is getting worse and worse with each iteration.
-Em
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Same here. I thought that google changed their favicon for some temporary reason, and that my browser cached it.
Big G was ok. Small g was not necessary. And the random colored dots is just ugly.
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What I have learned (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, as far as I knew that is what it is called.
What I have learned so far from this article is:
What falls in the what else is new category:
PK
Saw it the other day - Ugh (Score:2)
I noticed this the other day when I was using google.co.jp ... I thought it was just the Japanese one. My first thought was 'Oh wow, that's ugly.' Now I see it's going to be used for google.com, too... Ugh.
The user-submitted ones in the blog look way, way better, including the one they took the concept from. What were they thinking?
I can't stand it (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't stand it, the g that is entirely reprasentative of the company doesn't stand out anywhere near clearly enough, the entire thing is just a blob and it makes tracking Google tabs in firefox a nightmare.
The user submitted favicons FTFA by by Hadi Onur Demirsoy, Lucian E. Marin and Yusuf Sevgen are all considerably better.
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On a decent number of systems I've been using a UserScript [userscripts.org] (aka greasemonkey script) that gives me the original white/blue G, but with this new even more hideous favicon I now compulsively install the script on every computer I touch: the new one is such an offensive eye-sore in the tab-bar.
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You're not the only one to prefer the other user-submitted favicons to the one Google ended up with.
Typical Engineers (Score:2, Interesting)
Naturally I'm bitter because I'm a graphics person, and I've seen so many engineers try to do "design wheelies" with the drawing tools in Excel and get hopelessly stuck on the role of decoration in design during lunchroom conversations...but come on. Your opinion mat
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Right on! You tell them! Clearly the lack of keen insights such as yours into the nature of critical elements such as a favicon is what is holding Google back from becoming a hugely successful juggernaut of a company...
Oh wait, they are a hugely successful juggernaut of a company... so much for your keen insight. Maybe you should stick to lecturing the indecisive hippies in your class.
Re:Typical Engineers (Score:4, Informative)
s/insights/experience
>hugely successful juggernaut of a company
Uhh, yeah. You mean a very rich, successful company. And a company that is going to have one jacked up corporate culture in 15-20 years. We're still waiting to see how that part's going to develop. These companies get so big so fast, full of so much hot air, that we end up paying a creativity tax years down the road as they raise service fees to pay for all the middle managers who got in while the getting was good.
Sure, right now they're a big successful company with a lot of engineering divas and XKCD readers who think that they can literally do anything they want in life, and every door is open to them.
From my experience, immature corporate policy just feeds this crap. Individual personalities will differ; I'm sure there are some fantastic people there. But I'm talking not about money, or about individuals. I'm talking about the company's personality. How deluded it is. How many people are going to get cut once the hubris levels come down a bit. How long they can do no evil when they can't even publish guidelines for duplicating a graphic logo (that I've been able to find...)
>Maybe you should stick to lecturing the indecisive hippies in your class.
Yeah, sure. And you stick to heckling the lecturers of said hippies.~
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Complete lack of conventional role separation is the norm at Google.
FWIW user-submitted material tends to produce low quality results anyways... not terribly surprising that they came up with this junk.
Andre Resende (Score:4, Informative)
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Agreed. His 'g' is much easier to see.
Way to over-engineer the submission, Google.
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Impairing usability (Score:2, Insightful)
The purpose of a website's icon -- or any icon, for that matter -- is to provide a visual way to quickly find something in a list. Sometimes, the icon represents some abstract concept; in most applications, the "save" icon is a floppy disk, even though they're nearly obsolete. However, if the icon is unique, experienced users have no trouble connecting it with what it represents. I use icons exclusively for my bookmarks toolbar.
Of course, this only works when the icons don't change. Google has recently chan
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Yes, it is a usability problem.
In much the same way, a penny is money.
permutations (Score:2)
How many ways can you create a 16x16 pixel image? At what point does trademark/copyright no longer apply?
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If the pixels are black and white, 1.16 x 10^77 ways.
For 24-bit color, a helluvalot more.
I assume trademark/copyright will no longer apply here once humans colonize the entire universe, and the population starts to get closer to those numbers.
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you are both wrong. you have (16*256)*(16*256)
Whatever happened to "don't be evil"? (Score:2)
I guess we see how that really works, now don't we.
AVG if you care (Score:2)
It's the AVG logo rotated 90 degrees CCW with a G on it without the 3D light and shadow.
http://www.avg.com/ [avg.com]
Still, I like the old favicon. The new one isn't that great.
Dont care whether it's similar ... (Score:2)
Subject (Score:2, Funny)
the icon is gay.
UGLY (Score:5, Insightful)
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I cant stand it because its too attention grabbing; it overwhelms the tab-bar. I'd installed this userscript [userscripts.org] on a handful of my most used systems to revert the last blue/grey favicon to the older blue/white icon, but now that they've made it even more ugly, I've been compulsively installing the old favicon on every single system I touch.