RTFA: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-googl…

Google changed its favicon last year and many people said that the new one was ugly. Probably this the reason why Google decided to use another favicon starting from today. The new favicon uses all the colors from Google’s logo, while keeping the same lowercase “g”.

Marissa Mayer’s description from last year is very appropriate. “We wanted something distinctive and noticeable (…). We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn’t date itself.” Adam Howard, a reader of this blog, thinks that the new favicon “looks like a mini paint-by-numbers”.

Here is the new, new Google favicon (or favicon.ico) It certainly is more colorful, but I’m not sure how it will stand up against the rest of the tabs in my browser… and I have tons of tabs open at any given time.

To get some sense of how this happened, I’ve included some of the permutations Google worked through when creating their previous favicon in May 2008: