I’ve been thinking that Google hasn’t felt quite the same over the last few weeks. I soon realised that it’s because Google have updated their favicon; the first time they have done so in eight and a half years!

Instead of a capitalized boxed ‘G‘, you will now see the second g in Google.

It’s amazing how significant a small icon in the browser address bar can be. I hadn’t realised how often I subliminally use these icons. I’m pretty sure that when I glance at my open Firefox tabs that I use these icons to quickly determine what is what. I even get pee’d off when a site doesn’t have one. Which shows you that an icon is worth a thousand few words. Although this isn’t the case when I get into a lift (that’s an elevator) and they have those buttons. You know the ones. Someone is dashing for the closing doors and you quickly try to re-open the doors but somehow can’t.

The lift buttons look way too the same, in my opinion. That’s why I prefer the simpler(?) ‘OPEN‘ and ‘CLOSE‘ buttons instead of icons that look like each other.

So maybe that’s why Google changed their favicon. Maybe they were worried about looking too similar to everyone else. After all, bold capitalized letters are all the rage:

And it’s suprising how quickly we humans adapt to change: at first I hated the new small g, but now I don’t mind it at all.