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?