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?