1029524 - Search Engines added from Page Menu have smaller favicons

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Favicon Handling, defect)

Description

[Ioana Chiorean]

Attachment: Screenshot

OS: Android 4.4.4 and 4.1.2
Devices: Alcatel One Touch, Nexus 4

Steps:
1. Go to bugzilla.mozilla.org
2. Tap the menu -> Page -> Add a Search Engine
3. Go to Settings -> Customization -> Search 

Expected Results:
- Favicons should be of same size as the already added ones

Actual Results:
- The favicons of the Search Engines added through Page Menu are smaller

Note:
- Reproducible also on Gingerbread 2.3
- Reproducible with all mozilla pages: MDN, Marketplace, wiki, Sumo Etc

Comment 1

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Chris, do you know what's going on here?

Comment 2

[Chris Kitching [:ckitching]]

I think this is due to a discrepancy between the resolutions of bundled favicons and favicons downloaded from the web.
All the initially-present search engines have a favicon bundled of decent(ish) resolution. When you add a new one it uses the icon downloaded from the internet which, in the case of bugzilla.mozilla.org, is tiny.

This works both ways. Check out what happens when I go to amazon.co.uk and add it again (even though it's bundled):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/20asm7pwi06rp6k/amazon.png

The bundled icon is of *lower* resolution than the downloaded one.

There's two existing bugs that work together to create this problem:

The general problem of "We can't find an icon to represent this site that's of a good enough size" is Bug 826400. A fairly open-ended problem with no clear solution at the moment. The favicon work from last year helped a bit by allowing us to decode ICOs, but many sites still provide no high resolution icons. Perhaps some clever system to pick an image from the page to use as a thumbnail (comparably to how Facebook does when you post a hyperlink) is called for? Such a system could straightforwardly be plugged into the existing favicon caching system and get us nicer icons everywhere.

Favicons used for search engines are stored outside of the favicons database (the JS code that adds a new search engine fetches the icon from the db, encodes it as a base64 string and stores it again elsewhere:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/chrome/content/browser.js#7040
).
Ew.

Bug 961600 covers this problem. We could then cause the icon used in search preferences to be kept in sync with the icon served by the site each time we visit it, as well as eliminating the duplication of data (and all the other nice things Richard mentions in the bug).

Comment 3

[u421692]

Attachment: device-2014-12-30-174002.png

It seems that this affects the favicons from search suggestion list also.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.