You said it well, it’s hard to disagree. Manual saving is slowly goes to the past. This is actually a clear direction in software development. However, your words emphasize even more the legitimacy of using the floppy symbol for the Save function. Both concepts are antique and fit together perfectly. The elimination of the necessity of manual saving will take some time (due to the need for deeper changes in the Blender structure, I guess) and putting the old system in new (more modern) clothes (icons), which are conceptually different from other software on the market, is a quirk. Especially against the background of efforts to bring Blender closer to generally accepted UX standards.
When the necessity of manual saving disappears, the floppy icon will go into oblivion. In the meantime, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Exactly this. Whist saving is a thing - use the icon that 99.9% of the world understand to mean save.
When saving becomes irrelevant - so will the icon.
Why change something for the sake of it. There are loads of other icons in other applications that have almost universal meaning, but which come from outdated real world origins.
Just look at some of photoshop’s icons for things like area fill (paint bucket), dodge (a circle on a stick), stamp tool (and actual ink hand stamp). The icons represent the tools you might have used to perform such actions in a real life, but which bear little resemblance to the actual action you are performing on the computer…yet they have understood meanings due to their almost universal use across multiple computer applications.
Some of the very worst things about computer applications stem from programmers or application developers changing things just because they can or want to be seen to be different. If a defacto standard exists, it makes sense to use it unless there is a genuine reason not to.
Every e-mail client uses a paper envelope depiction. Some of phone apps use a magnetic tape symbol for voice mail. Not to mention oldschool phone handset in every smartphone or cimeatic camera with film rolls in… err… Blender.
To be honest, we’ve already been through this many times before…
Is the save command actually gone from Blender right now ? Or do we still need one for the time being ? What is the hold up ? Not controlling saving or versioning, I can’t imagine that. One has to be able to decide when to version up a file, when to overwrite their master file, etc.
The only save icon we need 
We live in the real world, where writing things take time, and isn’t always perfect. As long as it doesn’t work perfectly (read: forever), It’s much more worthwhile exposing this function to the user so they can be sure they know what their software is actually doing. Rather than trying to assume or abstract out whether or not the thing they’re working on actually made it to the hard drive or the server successfully.
I’d want my programs to match what’s actually happening, as long as what’s happening has an impact on what I might do. Saving is such an occasion. No-one ever trusts auto-save functionality.
Exactly.
Sad. This just destroyed all my hopes and trust.
Now we know why Blender is always weird and non-standard.
The save icon is more than anything else tha somethingt makes people comfortable with it.
It’s something consolidated, in 40 years of computing.
It’s true, it does not make sense with reality, floppies no longer exist.
It’s true there are much more powerful and effective methods to save a file …
The question is to be friendly or not with most of the people who approach blender the first times …
Even if it is practically almost superfluous, having the impression of “saving” a file, with the old consolidated method is something that reassures, it is more a psychological question …
Give the feeling of having control …
The real question then to answer is: is blender software for a few-pro or software for all?
Be friendly, my friends …
Personally, I find it amusing that we can debate the use of a floppy disk as the icon for saving files on a computer. Kids today have probably never seen any original “icons”. The “files” aren’t really files and they aren’t really saved. And it is not that long ago that “computers” were people…
it is the spirit of the floppydisk that does not want to die…
and in the end there is debate about things that have a more social importance than real utility 
The same could be said for cars. In the old days, you had to manually wind the motor to get things going.
With computers, users used to have to write all their programs and apps themselves, includingv manually handling memory management. That made them “know what their software is actually doing .”
Over time, we have eschewed that, and that’s a good thing. Computing has become open to a lot more people. Not everyone wants to be a developer or a mechanic or a systems integrator.
As for the icon: Icons, like words, have meanings. Using a wrong or misleading icon is worse than no icon at all.
I’m sorry, but I guess it’s better just say “No, I don’t care about the standards”, instead of try to find arguments.
Makes totally no sense.
I just tested your new icon file. Seems like a nice update. I’ll write a patch to add the new icons in and submit it during the next few days.
Computing standards evolve over time. We used to have to manually allocate memory, manually type commands in the terminal, manually write our own apps, read long MAN-pages just to do anything. Computing standards are, thankfully, not static.
There’s a quote by Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be”
The quote is most certainly not “I skate to where the puck was 30 years ago”
Saying “we no longer use floppies” as an argument for not using the floppy icon as save is a bit silly. There are loads of icons in blender that the actions in computer terms, bear no resemblance to the real world object the icon represents.
Why do we use an icon representing physical film stock for something like movie sequence editor? Physical film stock is irrelevant in the digital age.
Why do we use an icon of a padlock to represent locking things or actual keys for key frames, pens and pencils for drawing tools, paint brushes for painting tools, magnifying glass for search, paper file folders for file browser, analogue clocks for timing functions, physical chain for link, paper clip for append etc - the list goes on and on.
Icons are supposed to convey an easy to understand concept and I think the save icon is so ingrained in the psyche of computer users around the world that it’s pretty irrelevant what physical object it was originally designed to represent and whether that has any actual physical relevance to computing in the moderns age. You see the floppy disk icon - you know that means “save”.
It’s a bit like the icons used for play, record, fast forward, reverse, stop etc. Video recorders, DVD players, cassette decks etc have all used these icons for years. These icons are also used in blender because they are so ingrained, people instinctively know what they mean.
Yes, but Wayne played the game as it was at that time, not how he hoped it would become one day.
Today the best representation of saving is a floppy disk. That may change in the future. It might become a shoe, or a beer, or something else not yet invented, chosen by us all collectively. And that is when we select a different saving icon.
It’s true that the floppy disk is a standard for the save concept and it works well at least for now, i don’t know for the future.
But it’s true too that this is not the only way to represent it.
These last years, i’ve seen other ways to represent this concept and what is important for me is that we could have something else than the current checkmark to represnt it.
Because for me the checkmark is very confusing, it seems than the file has been saved even if it is not.
I think that a concept in relation with the “new file” can do the job, because the “save concept” is after all an operation on a file.
So for me, floppy disk or something else (like this mockup) but please not the checkmark.
what is really incredible to me is that you’ve been spending whole days debating for an icon.
The only reasonable voice here is thecavelap’s one, his argument is valid and the checkmark icon is really misleading.
Hey, some of us truly enjoy these long and detailed icon discussions.
I don’t like thecavelap’s suggestion or most variations that show an arrow moving toward or inside something representing a file. That type of thing really says “import” as it is showing the movement of something outside to within.
Saving, the general concept, is less about moving data about and more about giving permanance to, making something less ethereal, fixing it in place. That is a hard concept to portray in an icon, which is probably why we are still using an anachronistic floppy disk.
Choose freely. 
- Floppy disk icon for save
- Anything else
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