222602 - Favicon appears briefly in location bar when not web root favicon.ico

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Wayne Woods]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031016 Firebird/0.7+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031016 Firebird/0.7+

If you go to http://aaguide.co.nz/main/index.shtml, you see a site icon
(favicon) in the URL bar. But if you reload the page, it vanishes. No matter how
many times you reload (or ctrl-reload or cmd-reload) the page, it's still gone.
If you clear the cache, it comes back. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Navigate to http://aaguide.co.nz/main/index.shtml
2.Observe that the black and yellow "AA" favicon is present in the URL bar
3.Reload the page and observe that the URL bar now displays a generic icon.

Actual Results:  
Site icon (favicon) was missing from the URL bar. It had a generic page icon
instead.

Expected Results:  
Displayed the correct favicon.

This seems to be the same type of problem as bug 109959, however that bug dealt
with a problem in the Seamonkey browser. This bug seems to be specific to
Firebird, as the web page in question seems to be handled correctly with the
standard Mozilla browser. For that reason, I'm assuming this warrants a separate
bug.

The problem exists in the latest nightly builds of Firebird on both Windows and
OS X.

The problem page uses <link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="../images/favicon.ico"> to
define the page icon. It doesn't have a corresponding REL="icon" line.

If I save the entire page locally and load it from my computer, the problem goes
away. I can keep reloading the page and the icon remains in the URL bar. Could
this be because it's not using the cache?

As a side note, the icon continues to be shown on the tab and the bookmarks
sidebar. However, it refuses to appear in the bookmarks menu of the Windows
browser at any stage (Mac version doesn't show favicons in that menu anyway),
but maybe that's a separate bug (?).

Comment 1

[Wayne Woods]

Additional note: temporarily switching tabs is enough to make the icon in the
location bar vanish as well.

Comment 2

[Wayne Woods]

It appears that switching tabs doesn't erase the icon from the location bar in
the Mac version (20031030 Firebird/0.7+), just the Windows version I tested.
Sorry for the spam.

Comment 3

[Grey Nicholson (they/them)]

It does in Fb 20031029 / Win XP Home

Comment 4

[Wayne Woods]

Sorry for even more spam. It looks like I spoke too soon about tabbing problems
on the Mac, as something even stranger is happening. On the Mac, at least
(haven't confirmed Windows version yet), I can have three pages loaded in
separate tabs, say:
1. http:/www.mozilla.org
2. http://aaguide.co.nz/main/index.shtml
3. http://www.freewebs.com/mooquackwooftweetmeow/index.htm

If I continually switch tabs between them, sometimes their favicons appear in
the location bar and sometimes I see the generic page icon. The favicon can
reappear on the location bar after vanishing the last time I had that tab in the
foreground. It can reappear even if the reason it vanished was that I reloaded
the page and not because I'd switched tabs.

Can you reproduce this on the PC, Greg?

Comment 5

[Grey Nicholson (they/them)]

Fb 20031029 / Win XPH: I'm seeing consistent behaviour across all three of those
pages: switching to their tab causes the icon to appear briefly, then disappear;
reloading and force-reloading both cause the generic icon to appear - the site's
icon doesn't show at all.

The icons only seem to persist if: you are viewing the tab at the time when the
icon is loaded into the location bar (usually when the page finishes loading,
but sometimes the AA site's icon loaded before the page finished loading), and
either: you have not reloaded the tab since opening the page, or you have viewed
another tab and then come back before the icon loads. Simply staying on the page
does not seem to work.

Is this what your Mac's doing?

Comment 6

[Wayne Woods]

I just got a chance to test that on the Win XP version, and it's behaving as you
say, which is a bit different to the Mac one. Sometimes (randomly) I can get the
icon to reappear and persist in the Mac version simply by switching to another
tab and then back again. On Windows, the icon always just flickers for a moment
and vanishes again.

Comment 7

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Confirming.

Comment 8

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

*** Bug 224255 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Wayne Woods]

Afert investigating further, I'm adding a few further notes to this bug:

- Of the five-odd pages on which I've found this bug to occur, ALL use a favicon
that isn't favicon.ico at the web root. And NONE of them actually have a defined
favicon.ico at root.

- Of the dozens of "good favicon" pages I've looked at, ALL either deliberately
use the web root favicon.ico, or at least one exists for that site. So even if
they've defined another favicon in their code, it's still using, or trying to
use, the one at the root (which is what happens in the test URL for this bug).
Even if the defined favicon is called "favicon.ico", I think it still ends up
displaying the one at root. So it's as Greg said in bug 224255, only it must be
in the web root directory, as well as being called "favicon.ico", for it to work
right.

- It always draws the correct favicon in the location bar briefly, but it's
immediately overwritten by the root one (you can see this if you switch between
tabs quickly... the proper icon flickers for a millisecond). If there isn't a
root one, it uses the "generic file" image instead.

- As such, I think this bug is closely related to (or perhaps a dupe of) bug
204393. If you go to the web page listed for that bug (http://susning.nu) and
flick between tabs, you might be able to see that it very briefly displays the
correct "S" icon before it draws the "A" one.

- The major difference between this bug and the other one (bug 204393) is that
this bug deals with situations where there is NO root favicon.ico (so the proper
favicon is overwritten by a generic file icon), while the other bug deals with
an exisiting root favicon.ico overwriting the proper one. Also, clearing the
cache will fix this bug temporarily, while it has no affect on the other one.

Comment 10

[Stephen Frank]

This bug has been confirmed for Mac and Windows versions of Firebird; I want to
confirm it for the Linux build of Firebird 0.7:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20040214 Firebird/0.7

I can "consistently" reproduce the random behavior described by Wayne in comment
#4 (if reproducing such illogical behavior can be considered consistent). Also,
although I haven't extensively tested it, I have observed similar behavior in
Firefox 0.8 for Linux.

Comment 11

[PikeUK]

This now WFM (favicon returns after reload) in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98;
en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040727 Firefox/0.9.1+

Comment 12

[Wayne Woods]

I'm afraid this bug still exists in the current nightlies. I tested Mac OS X
20040727 Firefox/0.9.1+, and Windows XP 20040726 Firefox/0.9.1+

The easiest way to see it is to open the test URL
(http://aaguide.co.nz/main/index.shtml) in a new tab. The first time you load
it, you'll probably see the favicon in the URL bar. If you switch between tabs,
you'll see that the favicon has disappeared when you return to it.

Hitting reload or ctrl/cmd-reload still fails to restore the favicon. Emptying
the cache and reloading will.

Maybe the bug's fixed on the branch, but not the trunk?

Comment 13

[Wayne Woods]

Ah, I see. The fix for bug 174265 (which moves favicons from the cache into
bookmarks.html) will most likely fix this problem. It's currently only been
fixed on the Aviary branch, which would explain the discrepancy. I won't dupe
it, since the bugs themselves are different, but I'll set a dependency.

Comment 14

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

174265 is in on trunk and branch now; this should be fixed (only one favicon
tries to get loaded now).

Comment 15

[Wayne Woods]

Confirmed fixed on Mac OS X, 20040730 Firefox/0.9.1+ trunk nightly :)