Text in Icons
Casting my vote, in case anyone cares:
First, I think file manager icons should never rely on text to convey important information. When I’m scanning icons, that’s because I don’t want to read. Text adds visual noise that, over time, gives me a headache. It’s not that I’m dumb or scared of file types. It’s that little text blobs in primary colors distract me. To me, the file type blobs meant that when I was visually scanning a directory, the information I processed first was whether the files were, say, GIFs or PNGs, when I was more interested in separating pictures from source code.
Second, I think the debate is a bit off base. We should be asking ourselves, what important information that was previously conveyed by embedded text, has now become unscanneable in a file listing? There are a couple of things we can do here. For instance, we could make the icons for lossy image formats be slightly different from non-lossy ones. Likewise, if the functionality offered by various sharing protocols is significantly different, we could change those icons to indicate what general functionality is offered - and the name of the protocol is not a good indicator of the functionality it offers.