1475240 - allow setting favicon when creating discarded tabs

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: Frontend, enhancement, P3)

Comment 1

[Robert AB]

Is any chance that this bug will be solved soon?

This bug was also probably mentioned in Bug 1378647 comment 39.

Comment 2

[Michael C. Irvin]

With tabs.create() recently getting support for createProperties.discarded in FF63, session manager add-ons can now restore large sessions with very little resources and very quickly when using this method.  However, the real eyesore is after said session is restored, every tab has the default favicon until the tab is made active to load the actual favicon.  The author of "Tab Session Manager" is aware of the situation but needs the ability to restore the session favicons via this API.

The addition of createProperties.discarded is a great improvement, but the UX can be greatly improved by supporting setting favicon when creating discarded tabs.

Comment 3

[Jake]

Lots of power users are struggling with switching to Firefox Quantum because of poor native tab management. Web Extensions can only do so much (compared to XUL/XPCOM addons). Having no favicon on discarded tabs makes it unbearable when one restores session with hundreds of tabs via extension.

Comment 4

[Jake]

It's been 5 years. Any chances this is going to be resolved soon?

Comment 5

[mYnDstrEAm]

This is really important, please solve this asap.
I have many open tabs and due to a crash I had to restore the session with the TabSessionManager addon. There was an issue with TSM or TreeStyleTab (https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/3329) that made the restoration fail except when I stayed offline during restoration. This led to the favicons not loading for all the tabs while it should have simply loaded them from a local file. Session restoration while offline is just one of many examples of ways this can be a problem.
Retrieving favicons from websites during restoration would be a major privacy and server-load problem, so it's good that they're stored in a local file. There are probably problems that this file clears favicons when a session hasn't been opened for a while instead of keeping them and so on. However, this issue would be the larger first problem to solve. I don't know why this isn't done by default right from the start or is it intentional that they aren't loaded from the local database (why)? I think the importance of this issue should be raised.

Comment 6

[Elhem Enohpi]

There is now an addon called Reload Discarded Tabs that is meant to address this very annoying issue. Unfortunately it's extremely slow. It goes through each discarded tab, loads it, then discards it again. It would be a far better user experience if extensions like Tab Session Manager could load a session without loading all the tabs, but with favicons intact, in the same way that Firefox's built-in session restore does.