Google favicons

Almost every­one must have noticed by now that Google has a new fav­i­con for its search/news/maps/etc. pages. I per­son­ally hate it, I think aside from being drab, it actu­ally doesn’t imme­di­ately evoke “Google.” That lower-case ‘g’ is not as rec­og­niz­able as they seem to be hop­ing. It’s unfor­tu­nate for them that they’ve ended up with few and mea­ger iconic brand sig­ni­fiers. Their full ‘logo’ (if you can call it that) doesn’t scale well; maybe the most they have going for them is their color scheme, although it is strik­ingly sim­i­lar to Windows’/Microsoft’s long-standing color scheme. It’s really got them hand­cuffed until they can grace­fully re-brand with some­thing more ver­sa­tile. Good to know, then, that it’s only tem­po­rary.

I’ve also noticed this Google Reader fav­i­con show­ing up momen­tar­ily as the site loads, though only in Opera. It resem­bles the large logo on the offi­cial Google Reader blog, and I can’t fig­ure out what’s caus­ing it — what is it that Opera is load­ing before the stylesheet tells it to look elsewhere?