1516342 - Different favicon on different places within Firefox, but only for some users

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1494772

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Sören Hentzschel]

Attachment: Bildschirmfoto 2018-12-25 um 14.59.52.png

STR:

1. open https://www.nrz.de/staedte/duisburg/
2. drag the tab into the bookmarks toolbar

Expected:

There should be the same favicon in the tab and for the bookmark. But even the different favicons are expected, all users should see the same at least.

Actual:

On my system with a new Firefox profile the tab has the "N" favicon while the bookmark has the "NRZ" favicon. Other users were asked. Two other users see the same behaviour as descriped while three other users always see the "N" favicon.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The site is using an apple-touch-icon which is different from the other icons. Bug 1453467 has some of the history here.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

It's expected, though there are a few bugs where we can improve the situation, like bug 1494016.

Comment 3

[Sören Hentzschel]

Thank you. That's an explanation for why the tab and the bookmark have (or should have) different icons.

But do you also have an explanation for why the result is not the same for all users? As descriped in comment 0 it was tested by six users (me and five other users) and 50 percent saw different icons while 50 percent saw the same icon for bookmarks and tabs. is that really expected, and if so, how does it happen?

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

It depends on what is stored in the database and when that info was stored. In pratice the icon in the tab is always the most up to date, while icons in bookmarks are fetched from an historical cache. The decision to which icon to use is thus based on what is available in that cache (included old bad decisions/bugs...). All the icons are usually replaced by new page loads *after a week*, though if all icons are removed from a page we may not remove some the cached versions (for various reasons, among which keeping the code maintainable).
In practice, there are a lot of variables to consider.
If you'd delete favicons.sqlite from all those profiles and restart from scratch fetching new icons, they would likely all show the same icon.