1687894 - Icon (favicon) does not get displayed in bookmark when it is in SVG format

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[alien426]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:84.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/84.0

Steps to reproduce:

I add a basic favicon to a HTML document:
<link type="image/x-icon" rel="shortcut icon" href="data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB2ZXJzaW9uPSIxLjEiIHZpZXdCb3g9IjAgMCAzMjAgMzIwIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjxyZWN0IGZpbGw9InJlZCIgeD0iMTAiIHk9IjEwIiB3aWR0aD0iMzAwIiBoZWlnaHQ9IjMwMCIgLz48L3N2Zz4=" />

Actual results:

The favicon is displayed correctly in the tab when viewing the page. But when a bookmark is created, it does not have the icon.

The problem also exists when the icon is not a data URL, but a file. I also tested removing the "type" attribute and changing "rel" attribute to just "icon".

When the favicon is in bitmap format (GIF, PNG, ...), it works as expected.

Expected results:

Icon should be displayed.

Comment 1

[Hani Yacoub, Desktop QA]

Attachment: Favicon.png

I can't manage to reproduce this issue, I tried on both Firefox 84.0.2 and on Firefox Nightly 86.0a1. Favicon is displayed in bookmark.

Am I checking in the right place?

Thanks.

Comment 2

[alien426]

Curious. I can confirm that the bookmark of the page has an icon ... when accessed with file:// protocol.
However when I bookmark the page when viewed on localhost with https:// protocol, the icon is missing.

Can you test on a web server? I'm on Apache 2.4.46.

Comment 3

[alien426]

Attachment: chaykellyCOM(SVG favicon).png

I have found a website with SVG icon that can be used for testing the behavior:
https://chaykelly.com/blog/svg-website-favicon/

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Bookmarks & History' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 5

[alien426]

I have found out some stuff.
The problem seems to be that bitmap favicons are converted to PNG before being saved to the favicons.sqlite database.
The only SVGs I found in there have the "chrome://" protocol. The table is "moz_icons", relevant fields are "icon_url" and "data".

This is backed up by code in the _writeFaviconAttribute() function in https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/places/BookmarkHTMLUtils.jsm:

    if (!favicon.uri.schemeIs("chrome") && favicon.dataLen > 0) {
      let faviconContents =
        "data:image/png;base64," +
        base64EncodeString(String.fromCharCode.apply(String, favicon.data));
      this._writeAttribute("ICON", faviconContents);
    }

I still think that SVG icons should be supported for bookmarks. But it now seems like a conscious decision, not a bug.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

The example page in comment 3 works for us, is it not working for you?

SVGs are supported by favicons.sqlite, only other non-vector formats are converted

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

I tried to reproduce with the snippet in comment 0, with file:, http: and https:, it always worked for me. So this is not actionable.
To continue investigation here we'd need an online or offline test-case we can use to reproduce the bug. If you can provide that on some server you manager, that'd be useful and then you should feel free to reopen this.