1030571 - sometimes favicons are missing in the bookmark bar

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Places, defect)

Description

[Andreas Gal :gal]

I got a report that favicons are sometimes missing in the bookmark bar. They are also lower resolution than Chrome and Safari (separate bug). This was reported for fitbit.com and that doesn't reproduce for me but I am seeing this for the Getting Started page right now (missing Firefox globe). This might be a failure state issue. If for some reason we fail to fetch the icon we don't refetch it?

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Marco, do we have existing bugs covering this problem? Any theories as to how it occurs in practice?

Comment 2

[guigs [:guigs] PST (please needinfo me!)]

Hey I actually can reproduce this in 31. 
I have a profile from about 4 beta versions. I attached a screenshot of the ico not being there for old bookmarks, but they appear after a user clicks on them. 
Screencast
[http://screencast.com/t/a1unGQprq]

Is this the same bug? 

Other bugs
Use Higher res ico (may not be related): [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=854956]

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

No, I don't remember other bugs about favicons suddenly missing, and I don't remember any recent change touching that code. We need to figure what's up.
We usually don't discard favicons, but we replace them after 7 days (we ask the cache service about it's discarding time and we respect the same, up to a maximum of 7 days). So, they shouldn't disappear unless the existing bookmark gets removed and recreated without its favicon. May be related to Sync?

Just as a side note, restoring from json won't restore favicons, so after a restore ALL favicons of bookmarks are blank and, though if I read this correctly it's only some icons that disappear, so it's not that case. But may be the case for comment 2 if the profile was created starting from a backup. This may also happen if the database becomes corrupt and we replace it, but again, it's ALL favicons disappearing.

Regarding high res favicons, it's bug 492172

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

adding to backlog, even if it's not directly actionable cause we don't know the reason it may happen, those should be investigated.

PS: if we fail ti fetch the icon, we should just fetch it again at the next visit. To be clear, there is no background fetching of favicons, they are only updated on visiting pages.

Comment 5

[Sam Penrose]

This issue or something similar to it appears to be live [1]. Note that the resolution was an add-on installation. A search for "favicon" returns several that sound similar, with a cluster on Android.

[1] https://twitter.com/drvox/status/596694753556717568