Google has a new favicon

You may have noticed a change in Google’s favicon. A favicon is a small image that locates near the URL address bar. It is used to identify a website.

Today, I opened google.com to search for information as usual; I saw the new Google’s favicon. At first, I thought I was on the wrong website. I doubled check the website address. Well, it was the right one. Obviously, Google has changed their favicon again. The last change was in June. Today, they changed again. This new design is based on the original design by André Resende - a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil. Based on his design , Google makes a small change on background color and moves the letter ‘g’ off the center. In this new design, the new favicon including all four of Google’s colors (red, yellow, green, and blue) into the four corners of the favicon. This new favicon is another step to a more unified set of icons. In this favicon, Google has achieved many criteria:

We hope you like the new favicon, which nicely integrates all of our original criteria: distinctive in shape, noticeable, colorful, timeless, and scalable to other sizes.

In my opinion, the old Google favicon looks cooler than this one. It was simple and easy to understand. The new one is more attractive, but it is not easy to understand. What do you think about this change?