Google Favicon: Small 'g' is the new brand? Previews [image]

Many people noticed a small change: Google has a new favicon.

Google changed their “Favicon.ico”, the 16x16 image file thatusually shows in the browser address bar or in bookmarks. The old icon used a square with red, green and blue edges, wrapping an upper-case“G”. The new logo is a bit more open, showing just the lower-case blue“g” from the Google logo, without borders, and a bit of shadow. To see this, visit Google.com (or images.google.com, Google Product Search and so on), empty your browser cache and reload the page.

Is Google undergoing a rebranding exercise...?

Maybe they’re going to be known as ’the little g’ rather than ’The BigG’ from now on...

Google's favicon is hosted at google.com/favicon.icoand it's a 16x16 pixels image, a standard size for favicons. Googlereplaced the upper-case "G" in blue border, green and red borders witha lower-case purple "g" in a rounded corner rectangle.

I could get used to this:

Reception has been mixed, commenting on the new grey background, usability and recognisability when multiple tabs are open, lack of transparency and differing brands. Some bloggers note the new favicon 'totally fails on white background and in the urlbar [sic] on FF3RC1'. It is also noted that the 'googol' by which Google is named after, is spelt with a lower-case 'g'.

A before and after can be seen here, thanks to our tech team.

Google code still sports the old logo as of today.

Effects and debate
. I spent a good couple of minutes trying to find the right tab–I couldn’t find it because of a change to a very small image from a section of the browser I hardly every look at. You never realize how much these small things really incorporate into your overall web image. I’m amazed that such a small detail can prove to be so important to such a huge audience.

So why the change? What’s the point? Is there something coming? I can’t imagine such a departure from the branding just being nothing. What do you think?