Why Has Google Changed It’s Favicon ?

You all have probably noticed the recently change in Google’s favicon. Google’s old favicon was as below:

New one is as

Favicon is a short name for 'favorites icon'. IT also known as a website icon, page icon or urlicon and used to reflect the website identity. Everyone was surprised by this small change for such a big company. Old icon was there for almost 8.5 years. Reason explained by Official Google Blog is:

“The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we've also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set. Here's the full set:

The design process we went through was rigorous and interesting, so we thought we would share more of it here. We tried in total more than 300 permutations. It was much harder than we thought at first. We wanted something distinctive and noticeable, so we aimed toward transparency or semi-transparency, so the image would have a more distinctive noticeable shape than just a block. We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn't date itself. Since we don't really have a symbol that means Google, we felt it best to work with the logo and letters within it. Our design team tried literally hundreds of approaches. You can see some of our explorations here.

By no means is the one you're seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more unified set of icons.”

If you are interested in designing favicon for Google, you can submit them to Google.