[dfabulich]

I approve of getting rid of the lock icon, showing only a broken lock for HTTP and no lock for HTTPS. It's always been weird to have site permissions settings revealed by clicking that lock.

But the replacement icon looks really strange to me. They're calling it a "tune icon," but I've never seen a tune icon like this, with just two circles and two lines. Looks weird. I'm surprised that it fared well in the experiment.

I would prefer it if they'd use a gear icon, which is normally used for settings like this. You can see a gear icon at the bottom of the tune menu for "Site settings," which makes it all the weirder that they're using a tune icon in the URL bar and a gear icon in the menu for site settings.

[coldpie]

It represents a vertical list of toggle icons, commonly seen these days in preferences panes, including the flyout shown in the same image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh...

A gear icon would work as well, but the intent was immediately obvious to me.

[thetinguy]

Good luck describing that icon in words over the phone.

[hbn]

"See the 2 people with all their limbs cut off, staring up at the clouds?"

[verdverm]

My first impression was 69, but I may be biased since it is the month & day of my birth

[Shorn]

> 69

Ok, I'm in.

By the power vested in me by the Elders of the Internet, I hereby acknowledge `verdverm` as the original coiner of the term "The 69 icon".

[Gigachad]

“To the left of the url, an icon that looks like two slide toggles”

[happytoexplain]

This icon is gaining traction fast. I've seen it a lot over the past few years. "Tuning" and "adjusting" is a slightly more specific concept than "settings". I think users associate the "settings" gear with whole-app settings, or "technical"/"system" settings, and it might be something they're loathe to click on because that's typically a large forest of things they don't care about or understand.

Also, I think using not-well-known icons is actually underrated (see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35793362)

[pavon]

Firefox currently uses the same icon to configure site permissions (microphone, location, etc). However, it is only displayed if you have granted permissions. You can see it here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/site-permissions-panel

[noja]

The icon looks like something from audio equipment. I get it.

[reaperducer]

Aren't we supposed to hate skeuomorphism?

I forget whether it's cool or not this week.

[function_seven]

What icons have ever not been skeuomorphic?

I hate skeuomorphism when it's used wantonly, beyond the purpose of communicating how the UI works. Like that first version of the Apple Podcasts app that had a reel-to-reel animation¹, for example.

But icons... it's like the definition of the term.

> I forget whether it's cool or not this week.

I think it might be trending upward again. We all hated it in 2012, then the pendulum swung so far toward "flat design" that I (we?) would love to have too much of it again, if the alternative is not enough of it.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/atmasphere/8320805931/

EDIT: Just thought about it some more and realized some icons are good abstractions of a non-physical thing. Play, Pause, and the rest of audio controls, for example. And of course Back and Refresh are just arrows.

But for something like "settings", or "info", you're going to have to draw some sort of picture for that. Gears and lists of sliders are two already-recognizable things that people know means "guts of the machine" and "control console panel thing".

[mananaysiempre]

> What icons have ever not been skeuomorphic?

The download/,upload ones. For extra points, they're also an English-specific visual pun. I can't think of a language-neutral version, though, unfortunately.

(Was also going to mention play/pause/stop, power, and standby, but you edited those in already. Still throwing this out there in case anyone knows a solution to the download problem.)

[adrianmonk]

There are plenty of settings dialogs that use a bunch of horizontal slider widgets to tweak values, so I guess it's not entirely skeuomorphism.

[notatoad]

i think it's a fairly recognizable and standard icon, i've definitely seen it used for this sort of thing before. i've never heard it called a "tune icon" before but the name ultimately doesn't matter much

https://www.google.com/search?q=preferences+icon&tbm=isch

[benatkin]

The tune icon makes a lot of sense. It's unobtrusive. A gear icon would be highly obtrusive.