1428859 - Request to hide favicons on bookmarks bar to save space

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Lucy Harris [:lucyeoh]]

Attachment: IMG_20180108_140702.jpg

Recieved via paper mail and wanted to try and get it to the right place - please view attachment for details. 

Summary of request - "Please be considerate of your users and add back the option of favorites' being bookmarked solely with text."

Comment 1

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

Thanks for taking the time to file this after the paper request, Lucy.

This is a fascinating request because all the current enhancement requests I know about actually are about reducing the amount of space by reducing the padding and/or treating favicons without any text differently so that they're closer together, to cram more bookmarks onto the bar by removing descriptions of bookmarks. This request is asking the exact opposite... Marco, thoughts?

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to :Gijs from comment #1)
> This is a fascinating request because all the current enhancement requests I
> know about actually are about reducing the amount of space by reducing the
> padding and/or treating favicons without any text differently so that
> they're closer together, to cram more bookmarks onto the bar by removing
> descriptions of bookmarks. This request is asking the exact opposite...
> Marco, thoughts?

This kind of request exists from some time, so it may have some value, and it could be a good Safari-parity thing, on the other side it's already feasible through userChrome.css

The main disadvantage of hiding icons is distinguishing folders from bookmarks, indeed I'd probably suggest, if we hide icons for bookmarks, to still retain the folder icons.

I'd also take advantage of this discussion to point out we have 2 prefs about icons already: browser.chrome.favicons and browser.chrome.site_icons
These 2 are not used in a consistent way, indeed we could likely remove browser.chrome.favicons and use the other one everywhere

I expect there are users who may want to not have favicons on horizontal UIs like the toolbar, but see them in menus and other UIs, so I don't think we want a pref to hide favicons from everywhere.

To sum up there are 2 users requirements I can think ok:
1. PRIVACY: browser.chrome.site_icons controls whether favicons are loaded from the web in general, and can be good for privacy purposes. browser.chrome.favicons seems redundant.
2. SAVE SPACE: we could introduce another pref like browser.chrome.showFaviconsOnHorizontalUI that controls whether they are shown in UIs where they steal horizontal space.

Comment 5

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Mass bug change to replace various 'parity' whiteboard flags with the new canonical keywords. (See bug 1443764 comment 13.)

Comment 7

[lothar.haeger]

Just to make it easier for others to find the current workaround until this becomes a config option:

1. create chrome/userChrome.css in your profile folder if it does not yet exist
2. add the following lines to userChrome.css (omit the @namespace line if it already exists)

@namespace url(http: //www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul);

/* hide icons for bookmark folders */
#personal-bookmarks .bookmark-item[container="true"] .toolbarbutton-icon {
 display:none !important;
}

3. (only FF69 or above) in about:config set

toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true

Comment 8

[dftf]

To distinguish between folders and sites when in text-only mode, I'd suggest one of the following:

Use square-brackets around the names of folders:

[ News ]     [ Shopping ]     Google Maps     YouTube

Or add a down-chevron after a folder (e.g. in the Bookmarks Toolbar):

News ⬇     Shopping ⬇     Google Maps     YouTube

In both examples, "News" and "Shopping" are folders; "Google Maps" and "YouTube" are bookmarks

With the chevrons, they may need to adapt to where the bookmarks are being viewed. For example, in the "Bookmarks Sidebar", assuming it is on the left-hand side of the Firefox window, instead of "Shopping ⬇", display it as "Shopping ➡" to show which-way the flyout menu would occur