228862 - Store icons in bookmarks.html

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Michael Thome]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

This is an official request to inline page icons to bookmarks.html.  There are
certainly other workable implementations, such as a gc-able database.

Observations and opinions:
1. The desirable behavior for favicons is *not* cache-like, so should not be
implemented as such.  In particular, if you've got 100 bookmarks with
link/favicons (including sidebar and toolbar folder), you *REALLY* want them to
be displayed all the time.
2. copying bookmarks.html should copy the icons.
3. it would be nice to define your own icons for pages which don't have 'em
(including folders - 
4. icons are no more part of the served content than page titles - the server
provides a default title for the page which the client is free to use, change or
ignore completely. IMHO, page titles should be the model that is used for page
icons.
5. non-bookmarked pages may be considered a separate issue - in particular, I'd
say that using the (proposed) bookmark-supplied icons should be a useful
optimization, rather than a required behavior. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Oleg Sidletskiy]

a kinda similar bug: Bug 117895

Comment 2

[Michael Thome]

Similar, yes.  In fact, the discussion of bug 117895 is what prompted me to
submit this rfe.

However, I specifically wanted to request that bookmarks.html *not* be treated
as a cache of favicons (though they may default as such), but rather are treated
analagous to bookmark titles, where the act of creating a bookmark saves a
permanent association between the current URL, the server supplied page title,
and (putatively) the page's icon (from link or favicon)... no cache, no clever
updating, just a simple snapshot of the information required to properly label
the address.  The exsisting icon cache stuff is (more or less) fine as is - just
don't try to use it for bookmark icons.

I'd like to draw a distinction between the general problem of caching icons
(which is important from a performance and resource optimization perspective)
and the problem of permanently associating "sticky" icon images with bookmarks,
etc (which is required for good use experience - e.g. it is not acceptable for
bookmark icons to go away unpredictably). Much of the discussion in the various
other favicon threads seems to me to be based on the confusing/conflating the
two issues.

Comment 3

[Oleg Sidletskiy]

I might be some way off here, but I think this feature could be implmented by
using MHTML, which would make this bug dependable on bug 40873.

Comment 4

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

It could also use data: URLs for storing the icons.

Comment 5

[Adam Hauner]

Frank Wein: read Walden's comment about data:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117895#c48

Comment 6

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

Patch in progress for this and other favicon issues at bug 174265

Comment 7

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

Patch went in on aviary for bug 174265 that does this; no way to define your own
icons, etc., though it could be done with some UI.

Comment 8

[Oomingmak]

Perhaps the UI bit could be an 'Icon' or 'Appearance' tab on the Properties page
of a boomark. This could be used to display an icon preview, as well as
specifying which icon to use (path etc.)

Comment 9

[Michael Thome]

Indeed, this looks awfully close to what I'm looking for.  If I understand the
comments right, it looks like the aformentioned patch updates the bookmark icons
on revists... IMHO, this is not the correct behavior, and would be better served
by an extension or a (default off) option.  E.g. would you want bookmark titles
to be changed everytime you visit a bookmarked site?
I'd rather the bookmarks be (by default) fixed at creation time.

Comment 10

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

(In reply to comment #9)
> Indeed, this looks awfully close to what I'm looking for.  If I understand the
> comments right, it looks like the aformentioned patch updates the bookmark icons
> on revists...

No, it'll set the icon once on the first visit (soon at the time the page is
bookmarked), and then won't set it again..

Comment 11

[Brian G.]

still isn't working right on some sites.
example zeldman.com, bt.easytree.org, texturizer.net/firefox/themes/,
alistapart.com, suprnova.org

favicon apears in tab and in addressbar, but not in my bookmarks.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

Comment 12

[Martin Poirier]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Indeed, this looks awfully close to what I'm looking for.  If I understand the
> comments right, it looks like the aformentioned patch updates the bookmark icons
> on revists... IMHO, this is not the correct behavior, and would be better served
> by an extension or a (default off) option.  E.g. would you want bookmark titles
> to be changed everytime you visit a bookmarked site?
> I'd rather the bookmarks be (by default) fixed at creation time.

Although I care litlle about favicons and setting it only once on first visit
suits me, perhaps we should set a new favicon if the target picture file has
changed. This may be tough to implement though, and will require periodic checks
of the target file to see if it has changed. Changes may be hard to detect of
the file has the same size, but the graphig is completely different.