Google Chrome (2011)Copied

Chrome was first released in 2008 with a shiny icon. In March 2011 Google replaced it, removing the shine and going minimalist, AfterDawn reported, a week after the same treatment was applied to Chromium, the open-source project behind the browser. The new icon appeared first in the developer channel for Chrome 11.

Google said Chrome had improved significantly since its first release and that it was refreshing the icon to better represent the speed and simplicity of the modern browser and operating system. On the Chrome blog, a Google designer explained that because Chrome was about making the web as easy and clutter-free as possible, a simpler icon embodied its spirit: quicker, lighter and easier for everyone.

The blog also credited the public. Googlers and fans had already been reinterpreting the icon in posters, magnets and videos, and those versions had moved it toward simplicity and abstraction on their own, so it felt right to make the structure cleaner and easier to recreate. The redesign was described as a group effort, with many variations tested in different contexts and an eye on print and web consistency before the final resizing and pixel-pushing.

AfterDawn's commenters mostly hated it. They called it lame and a downgrade from futuristic to plain, and one said the old icon looked like a high-tech toy ball while the new one recalled the era of tape backups.

The Next Web relayed the reasoning: Google said it had explored many variations and tested the icon in different contexts, and that the flat version was simpler and easier to recreate, a quicker, lighter mark for a browser built on those promises. By late April, Engadget reported, the flat icon had reached the stable Chrome 11 release alongside security fixes and speech features, and it was there to stay. Removing the gloss was the right instinct a couple of years before the whole industry went flat, which makes this one of the quieter pioneers of the trend.

History sided with Google. Dropping the chrome from Chrome anticipated the flatter look that followed, and the observation that fans were already simplifying the mark is the best brief a designer can get: the public had told Google what the logo really was. What it lost in spectacle it gained in legibility at favicon size, where a browser icon actually lives.