162895 - Favicons in chrome should be transparent

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

Most favicons (like cnn.com for example) have a solid white border, which looks
fine in the urlbar page proxy, but stands out in the toolbar or a tab. They
should be made transparent.

Comment 1

[GAThrawn]

There are perfectly simple and fairly well documented ways for a site to have a
transparent favicon.

The simplest being use the <link rel="icon" href="icon.png" type="image/png" />
and then using a PNG image could give them a favicon with alpha transparency,
similarly using GIF files they could get simple transparency.

Even using the \favicon.ico in the default Windows icon format has a simple
transparency feature which is used by some sites, eg see
http://www.userfriendly.org/ for an example.

Any site that has an icon with a non-transparent background has made a choice
that that is how their logo should look, and we ought to respect that.

Comment 2

[S Woodside]

Agree with comment 1 ... although I can't imagine a situation where making a
white outline transparent would be bad.

Comment 3

[Sergey Sokoloff]

Such a situation (where making a white outline transparent is inappropriate) is
easy to imagine. For example, when the above discussed toolbar is light gray
(it's true for Pinball skin and some other ones), then some gray text or small
gray logo, which looks quite O.K. on solid white background, nevertheless
quickly becomes unintelligible on those shades of gray native to the toolbar.

This bug would better be wontfixed.

Comment 4

[Chris Casciano]

I side with wontfix

we'd be saving one bad presentation, but creating others... especially if there
isn't an easy way to mask just the outer white.. consider something like the
washingtonpost.com icon if you mased the "outer" white and it was sittting on
the grey of a background tab.

Comment 5

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Yup, too hard to do right.