Furthermore, they’ve changed the style of the “number of unread messages” badge on the favicon so that it’s bigger and less… neat, is probably the right word, having gone for the “write the number in a normal sort of a font on a semitransparent white background and sit that atop the original favicon” rather than writing the number in what’s essentially a small bitmap font without needing the semitransparent white bit; and given that style, it looks quite terrible on a dark background, which my tab bar is. It ends up looking like the icon is just a number on some indistinct mess, with no real substance of the logo left visible, where before it was a clearly-visible small number on a clear and distinct Zulip logo. It’s unfortunately fundamentally impossible to pull off the style they’ve changed to—you must know whether it’s going to be matted against a dark or light colour for it to work, and the web doesn’t give you that. (I really wish it did. Sure, there are a couple of workarounds like using the (prefers-color-scheme: dark) media query to guess that the tab bar is probably dark, and that if that doesn’t match it’s probably light, but that’s still wildly inaccurate and insufficient. It’s a big enough deal that I’d like browser manufacturers to come up with something.)
In all this I do say that I’m not fond of it yet. It’ll doubtless feel more acceptable after a few days. But comparing my reasons for disliking it with other occasions when I’ve not liked change (either at first or forever), I don’t think it’s going to grow on me as much as many do.