Google must have had some feedback about its dull and horribly weak-looking new favicon, which is no doubt appearing in a browser tab very near you. The Official google Blog has put up a not-very-spirited defense. This points out that they hadn't changed it in 8.5 years -- yeah, that's a really good reason for making something worse.
Google also says: "The design process we went through was rigorous and interesting". In other words, "we screwed it up, but a lot of people did a lot of work to make sure we screwed it up really thoroughly." This is known in the industry as "the Microsoft defence".
Another good excuse is: "we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone". So trying to look good on a couple of million phones is a good reason for looking terrible on a billion desktops and notebooks? Would you like to take a vote on that?
The clincher is that the blog shows a whole panel of variations, which just goes to show that a monkey could have picked a better favicon with a pin.
Still, I shouldn't really complain about Google using a lower case g as a favicon, because the Guardian already uses a lower case g as a favicon. I should be grateful that they have made their's look worse than ours ;-)
Revert Back To Old Google Favicon
You all must have noticed the new Google favicon image, which is now a simple blue-coloured g, instead of the colourful-boxed G. Some people are liking it and have appreciated the new favicon, but on the other side there are people, like me, who think that the old favicon was better. I really don’t like this favicon, and have found a way by which you can revert back to the old one.
It’s a very simple Greasemonkey script (What is this?) which changes the new Google favicon with the old favicon image.
Requirements
The requirements are simple. You need to have Firefox (download here) with Greasemonkey script installed. Or you can alternatively use some add-on for Internet Explorer to run Greasemonkey scripts.
How To Revert Back To Old Google Favicon
- Download and install this Greasemonkey script.
- Enable it and enjoy!
You might need to refresh your already opened Google pages after installing this script for the changes to take effect.
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