1411120 - Bookmarks BookmarkTreeNode API should expose favicon URL

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1315616

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Brian Mock]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.62 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I used the WebExtensions bookmarks API to make a new tab page extension but was unable to find a way to obtain favicons for bookmarks.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/bookmarks/BookmarkTreeNode

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/bookmarks/getSubTree


Actual results:

BookmarkTreeNode does not expose the favicon for a bookmark.


Expected results:

There should be a new optional property called `faviconUrl` which is a URL pointing to the favicon for the website. Ideally this URL would point at the browser's cached version to avoid network requests.

Comment 1

[Geoffrey De Belie (Smile4ever)]

Related: Give extensions access to cached favicon URLs - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1315616

Comment 2

[Geoffrey De Belie (Smile4ever)]

From a standpoint of an addon developer, it would be better to expose the favicon as base64 to avoid having to do a lot of requests to multiple favicon URLs.

Comment 3

[aafn]

Indeed, as add-on developers, what we need is a data: URI as faviconUrl, to directly display as an <img>.

This also has the additional benefit of avoiding cases where the destination URL is asking for credentials (user/pwd) to retrieve the contents.

Comment 4

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi mock-brian, this has been added to the agenda for the WebExtensions APIs triage on March 13, 2018. Would you be able to join us? 

* We normally spend 5 minutes per bug
* The more information in the bug, the better
* The goal of the triage is to give a general thumbs up or thumbs down on a proposal; we won't be going deep into implementation details

Relevant Links: 

* Wiki for the meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Triage#Next_Meeting
* Meeting agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b4r8z964_Est_mbSYUx9jtRt-HTtXgu-EAzM_3yr7ww/edit
* Vision doc for WebExtensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Vision

Comment 5

[Brian Mock]

Hi Caitlin, I've put it on my calendar and should be able to attend. Thanks for the invite.

- Brian

Comment 6

[Brett Zamir]

I'd like to see favicon data exposed for history (as well)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/history/HistoryItem

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/history/search

Should I file a separate issue or is this close enough to tack on here?

Comment 7

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

This was approved in the design-decision meeting, but we're going to dupe this into the more general bug 1315616, which has been approved.

Comment 8

[Brett Zamir]

Did that approval include exposing favicons on history items as well, Caitlin?

Comment 9

[Brian Mock]

Brett: I believe the resolution from the meeting was close this in favor of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1315616 which is a more general solution that would solve both of our use cases and also address some security concerns around the API.