Brave 1.77.101 with Chrome 135.0.7049.115
Windows 10 Home x64 22H2
Can I change the program icon for Brave?
Would be nice if I could configure a more subdued default icon for the Brave web browser. A desktop or folder full of URL shortcuts using Brave is quite garish when there is a slew of white-faced bright-red-maned lions.
No, I’m not going to right-click on every URL shortcut to go into its Properties to pick the Custom tab where I change the icon – and which applies ONLY to that shortcut. That would passable for URL shortcuts that are indefinitely permanent on my desktop, or in Taskbar toolbars, but it is ridiculous having to do it over and over for every new URL shortcut, especially since some may be temporary for a couple hours or a few days.
I have a solid black Windows background for my desktop. I’m not into cutsy, garish, or inane pics on the desktop. I would like program icons to be subdued as well. There are 14 icons as resources inside the brave.exe file; however, other than the white-faced bright-red-maned lion icon, the other icons are to indicate non-release builds (Nightly, Dev), or have a page icon with a tiny lion icon overlay. That is, none of the icon resources within brave.exe are good choices. I want to change the application icon for Brave, so a different icon is ALWAYS used, not just when I modify a shortcut to Brave.
There are several HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Brave* keys in the Windows registry with a DefaultIcon key for each, but I don’t know which of those to change to select a different icon resource inside of Brave. Plus, I would need to know the resource index for each of the icons inside of brave.exe to know which index to specify in the registry edit. Even if I selected the correct key and data item along with the resource index to modify in the registry, an update to the program could possibly overwrite the registry setting.
The icon resources are already inside brave.exe, but not great choices. Brave doesn’t give the user an option to pick one of them as the default for its program icon, like the white-faced blue-maned lion (but would prefer without the Dev, Nightly, or Beta text overlay).
The white-faced bright-red-maned icon is, at best, loud and distracting, and, at worst, a deliberate effect to advertise Brave. You cannot ignore you have several URL shortcuts on your desktop, or in a folder, that use Brave, because of the garish coloring and size of its icon.