184030 - Bookmarks toolbar: composite icon with favicon

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Bookmarks, enhancement)

Description

[S Woodside]

Currently (2002120604) there is a nice icon for the bookmarks that don't have a
favicon assigned in the bookmarks toolbar. When a favicon is found it completely
replaces the bookmark icon. The request is to instead composite the bookmark
icon with the favicon. The favicon would be shrunk to 1/4 size and placed where
the little blue world appears in the default icon.

motivation: greater consistency with the default metaphor (the world in the
location bar becomes small in the default bookmark icon, bring favicons in line
with this behaviour). Also a "cleaner" appearance for the bookmarks toolbar.

Comment 1

[Stephane Moureau]

Favicons are already too small and for a composite which page's favicons to use ?
1 page = favicons if not single bookmark icon
x page (tabs) = multi-pages bookmark icon
At least you can see if it's a single page or a multi-pages/tabbed.

Comment 2

[S Woodside]

Don't change the multi-tab bookmark icon. The icons aren't too small -- they'll
be displayed at full size in the location bar when opened and on each tab.

Comment 3

[Jasper]

I'm sorry to say this but, this request is completely impossible and useless .
Apparently you did not do your math.

The smallbookmark.tif icon is 15px/15px and so is a site icon. In your
proposition you want to composite a 1/4 of 15px = 3.75px square icon on a 15px
icon. The result of this would be completely useless and a waste of resources
since no living human being would be able to keep two 4px square icons apart.
The only way to keep them apart would be by color but that's completely useless
to. So you would have a different blob of color on the default smallbookmark
icon. Is it just me or does this request sound completely ridiculous?

[quote] motivation: greater consistency with the default metaphor (the world in the
location bar becomes small in the default bookmark icon, bring favicons in line
with this behavior). Also a "cleaner" appearance for the bookmarks toolbar.
[/quote]

From what I understand of your motivation you just want a "cleaner' appearance
of the bookmarks toolbar. And with this I have to agree in a way. But your
solution wouldn't work. Why don't we ask for a preference where we can select or
deselect the visibility of site icons in the bookmarks toolbar? That would be
much cleaner all together for the people that like clean appearances!

Comment 4

[S Woodside]

Attachment: pshop mockup

photoshop mockup

Comment 5

[S Woodside]

Attachment: traditional

what it would look like traditionally

Comment 6

[S Woodside]

I think it looks beautiful if I may say so (and I think I may, since I just
spent an hour in pshop mocking it up...)

Jasper: apparently you never learned math. 1/4 size is 8x8 pixels, 1/4 as many
pixels, half length per size. Is it just me or would you maybe be better off
making positive comments instead of slagging me?

Comment 7

[Stephane Moureau]

Simon, you forget that you can also have other types of icons, local files, ftp,
mail, pdf, etc... which are similar for the moment but a RFE has been made.

If you want consistency, just change the 2 icons (1 page,multi-pages) to make
them bigger, like a favicon, instead of reducing all the others.
I stay with my comment 1.

Comment 8

[S Woodside]

I'm afraid I don't understand your comment Stephane.

NB: my mockup I destroyed the transparency of the icons. The "X" and the mozilla
icon should have transparency through to the standards bookmark icon.

Comment 9

[Steve Smart]

Attachment: Comparison of resampling methods

Simon: why should the icons be transparent? Shouldn't they just be a badge on
the standard icon, replcaing the globe badge that they have now (I've never
seen a transparent badge)?

Basd on the mockup, I think this looks great. The only issue is going to be
resampling the image as well as Photoshop does; web browsers typically use
nearest neighbor resampling, which looks like crap (at least that's what they
do if you tell them to stretch an image using width="" and height="". Do we
have image code that can resize something well? Here's a comparison using the
VersionTracker favicon.

Comment 10

[ryan g]

the tradtional method is better in my eyes... your way makes it so you have to
use a microscope to see the website icons...

Comment 11

[S Woodside]

Why do you need to be able to read it? The colours/patterns/shapes are still
visible and the name is there as well.

Comment 12

[Jasper]

I see why this is interesting, but I don't see why we would do this since it
won't  enhance the differenciation between files. It will only make it worse.

Comment 13

[Sergey Sokoloff]

Those ultra-mini icons are unintelligible on my 1280x960 19" display.

I hope this disastrous bug will never be fixed. Or at least it should be left a
preference, turned off by default.

[CCing myself]

Comment 14

[Bruce Davidson]

Marking this as WONTFIX. The resulting icons aren't readable on many screens,
and favicons are generally designed for showing as 16x16 images, which is what
every other browser does. Suddenly limiting this to half or a quarter as many
pixels isn't going to do any favours for Camino's appearance or usability.

This might be a nice idea in a world where favicons were as gloriously scaleable
as MacOS X icons, but that's not the world we're in :-(.