Last Friday, Google replaced their colourful upper-case 'G' icon with a more subtle lower-case 'g' icon. This has upset a lot of users who prefer the old one. Personally I don't really mind but what I found interesting is that the change has really impacted my browsing. I often have 10+ tabs open at the same time in my browser and switch between them often but it wasn't until Google changed their highly recognisable icon that I realised how much I rely on the icons to locate tabs. Every time I want to switch to a Google tab I spend several seconds scanning and re-scanning the tab bar looking for that familiar 'G'. When I don't find it, I start reading the tab names. Fortunately someone has thoughtfully created a Greasemonkey script that changes the Google favicon back to the original 'G'. On the whole I think the new lower-case 'g' icon looks nicer than the old one but the old one lets me work more efficiently! Who would have thought that favicons, regarded by many as a pointless gimmick when first introduced by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 5, would end up having such an impact on our productivity?
Google's New Favicon