252288 - incorrect bookmark favicon sometimes picked up for site without favicon

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Asher]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040719 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040719 Firefox/0.8

On two different computers with the 7/19 nightly build, I've been using the
toolbar bookmarks to go to several websites.  

Eventually two bookmarks wind up with the same favicon as another bookmark.  

On the first PC, "gmail" and "apolyton.net" both got the Netscape favicon,
though neither actually have the favicon on the server and neither run
Netscape's webserver.

On the second PC, "apolyton.net" has the Mozillazine icon (though so does the
Mozillazine bookmark).

I cannot identify a direct cause for the problem.  My usual surfing habits use
multiple tabs, often I'll hold CTRL and click a toolbar bookmark with several
tabs already open.

Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Asher]

The contents of bookmarks.html show the favicon as being identical as well. 

example:
Apolyton.net:
ICON="data:text/plain;base64,AAABAAIAEBAAAAEAGABoAwAAJgAAABAQAAABACA..."
Mozillazine:
ICON="data:text/plain;base64,AAABAAIAEBAAAAEAGABoAwAAJgAAABAQAAABACA..."

Comment 2

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Just to confirm, apolyton.net (the site) does not have a favicon at all, correct?

Comment 3

[Asher]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Just to confirm, apolyton.net (the site) does not have a favicon at all, correct?

That's correct, neither does gmail.

I've since completely uninstalled Firefox and did a fresh install with no
extensions to try to reproduce, as somebody pointed out to me that my useragent
still said 0.8 (though 20040719 was the datestamp).  I've used it minimally
since, and the problem has not resurfaced, so it *may* be a problem left from
upgrading from previous versions of Firefox.

Even then, I'd consider it an issue.  The vast majority of users will install
over-top of the old install, so the installer should either have an upgrade
option which wipes the old install and replaces it with the new one, or these
kind of bugs should be fixed.

Comment 4

[Michael Lefevre]

Gmail does have an icon (not with a link, just at
http://gmail.google.com/favicon.ico )

and don't suggest "wiping" things with the installer - bit of a sore point from
when it wiped too much ;) That shouldn't be an issue going from 0.9 to 1.0 and
onwards.

Comment 5

[Asher]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Gmail does have an icon (not with a link, just at
> http://gmail.google.com/favicon.ico )
> 
> and don't suggest "wiping" things with the installer - bit of a sore point from
> when it wiped too much ;) That shouldn't be an issue going from 0.9 to 1.0 and
> onwards.

Oh, I see.  I use https://gmail.google.com, which doesn't seem to have a
favicon.ico (or at least I can't access it, and Firefox doesn't load it).

Comment 6

[Michael Lefevre]

ah... actually https://gmail.google.com/favicon.ico returns HTTP 302 redirect to
http://www.google.com/ - I don't know if that's relevant. But yeah, it doesn't
have an icon.

Comment 7

[Ryan Polk (Quark)]

I just had this happen to me with http://www.anandtech.com/
The biggest hint I can give is that the favicon it has is from my homepage (a
yahoo.com fantasy sports league).  Occasionally, when yahoo.com is being slow
upon starting Firefox, I'll open some stuff and the first tab (whcih had only
half-loaded yahoo.com) will still use yahoo.com's favicon.  This behavior MAY
only be happening when I'm using 'Open in Tabs', but I haven't been paying
enough attention to it yet.

I know for a fact the Anandtech favicon was falsely modified after using 'Open
In Tabs'.

Comment 8

[Nick Howitt]

I get similar problems. I tried a clean install on a fresh profile. I then
copied my bookmarks.html to the new profile and removed all strings
ICON="......." in the file. To pick up the correct favicons I went into a couple
of different bookmark folders and clicked on Open in Tabs. Most favicons were
picked up correctly, some incorrectly and some not at all. I have one which
never seems to be picked up by "Open in Tabs", but will be picked up if I select
that bookmark individually. I can send my bookmark file if needed.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040720 Firefox/0.9.1+

Comment 9

[Stebs]

I had also some favicons-Problems with nightly build 20040719. I did use a
"cleaned" bookmarks.html (import in IE and then reimport to FF) because I had
used the nightlies of the days before.
Nevertheless 2 Icons on my (well filled) Bookmarks Toolbar Folder that should
have been empty (no favicon) showed the known bug of a "foreign" favicon after
some wild and fast Browsing action. Also one Bookmark on the Toolbar Folder
would not show its correct favicon although it was shown on the Tab and also in
the Location Bar (even after closing and reopening FF)
Deleting those Bookmarks and recreating them solved all those Problems.
Seems to work fine now :-), a pity those Problems are so hard to reproduce...

Another Question (to vladimir): Would it be possible to remember the favicons of
an Livemark?  Example: http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/peter6/firefoxfeed.xml
Mostly those have always the same favicon but obviously it gets lost when the
Livemark is "updated". And far more important: I hope you make sure that
bookmarks.html doesn't get constantly "filled" with "outdated" favicons from
Livemarks etc.   


 

Comment 10

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Attachment: favicons-fix-0.patch

I can't reproduce the issue, tried with open-in-tabs with about a dozen sites
all with favicons, and all ended up with the correct ones.  However, I think I
know what the issue is, and this patch should fix it...

Comment 11

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Patch in on aviary; please bang hard on favicons, as a lot of the bugs are
hard-to-reproduce race conditions.  I think I've gotten rid of all possibilties
of the races now, but I can't be sure.

Unfortunately, if you had incorrect favicons already set, you'll have to either
clear them out manually in bookmarks.html, or check out an extension like:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=671076

Comment 12

[Nick Howitt]

I posted in comment 8. I have again cleaned my bookmarks.html file. FF still
fails to pick up some icons on my bookmarks (this time including mozilla.org
which was OK last time) when I open in tabs. I have not seen it pick up wrong
ones, just fail to pick up all the ones which exist.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040726 Firefox/0.9.1+

Comment 13

[Asher]

The problem still exists on the 20040725 nightly.

A site with a favicon has its favicon set correctly, but a site without a
favicon also has the first site's favicon.

Comment 14

[Asher]

I've found a way to reproduce the incorrect-favicon assigning:

Have 2 tabs open and 2 bookmarks, 1 for each tab.  Site1 has a favicon, Site2
doesn't.

Start with both tabs opened to Site1.

Click a bookmark for Site2 (most conveniently from the toolbar very close to the
tab), and then very quickly click the second tab for Site1 (the site with the
favicon).

If it doesn't work right away, vary the speed slightly.  It reproduces about 90%
of the time for me, assigning Site1's favicon to Site2's bookmark.

Comment 15

[Nick Howitt]

Attachment: Bookmarks File

This is a copy of my bookmarks file for comments 8 and 12.
Opening Mozilla Firebird & Mozilla Information" in tabs picks up all available
favicons except the one for http://mozilla.org/. This time, opening this
bookmark in a tab does not correct the favicon.
If you open "Forums" in tabs, "Computer Cops  Forums  Proxomitron General" does
not pick up it's favicon.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040725
Firefox/0.9.1+
and
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040726
Firefox/0.9.1+

Comment 16

[Gennady Feldman]

Regarding favicons. I have a bookmarks file i've been using for a very long time
and i can see the icons updating for some sites and not updating for others.
When i pulled up the bookmarks.html file in a texteditor i noticed that ICON=""
is set to an http url to a favicon. In some cases the URL is not even for the
same site. Other than removing the URLs by hand, could this be an impact for
favicons loading/updating when ICON="http://....."?

Comment 17

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

(In reply to comment #16)
> Regarding favicons. I have a bookmarks file i've been using for a very long time
> and i can see the icons updating for some sites and not updating for others.
> When i pulled up the bookmarks.html file in a texteditor i noticed that ICON=""
> is set to an http url to a favicon. In some cases the URL is not even for the
> same site. Other than removing the URLs by hand, could this be an impact for
> favicons loading/updating when ICON="http://....."?

Nope, ICON URLs that aren't data: are ignored now (mainly because of the issue
of old bookmarks files with incorrect icons).  I just need to catch the few
remaining bugs to make sure we don't get new data: URLs in there with incorrect
icons... :)

Comment 18

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

(In reply to comment #15)
> Created an attachment (id=154383)
> Bookmarks File
> 
> This is a copy of my bookmarks file for comments 8 and 12.
> Opening Mozilla Firebird & Mozilla Information" in tabs picks up all available
> favicons except the one for http://mozilla.org/. This time, opening this
> bookmark in a tab does not correct the favicon.
> If you open "Forums" in tabs, "Computer Cops  Forums  Proxomitron General" does
> not pick up it's favicon.

Finally had a chance to look at this, thanks for attaching the bookmarks file!

What's happening is this: for a bookmark to get a favicon attached, the
bookmarked URL has to exactly match the URL that that actually loads a favicon.

For your mozilla bookmark, you have "http://mozilla.org/" bookmarked -- which is
a 301 redirect to "www.mozilla.org".  For computercops, you have
"http://www.computercops.com/......" bookmarked, which is a 301 to
"http://computercops.com/.....".  The favicon handlers don't fire until the
actual page gets loaded, thus they never get a chance to try to fetch even
/favicon.ico from these URLs before the redirect happens.  This will be fixed
once bug 213467 is fixed.

Regarding comment #14, I've tried to reproduce it but failed to do so; any
particular sites where you can reliably reproduce this, or is it happening on
any two sites as long as one has and the other doesn't have a favicon?  I'm
changing the summary on this bug to reflect just that issue and will look into
it further.  (Any other probles, please file new bugs.)

Comment 19

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

This particular bug doesn't depend on 213467; an as-yet-unfiled bug regarding
"bookmarks don't get favicons if the URL 301-redirects to another site" does.

Comment 20

[Mike Pesce (:By-Tor)]

Another example of improper favicon handling can be found at
http://www.freewarepalm.com/ where there is data saved for the icon, yet no icon
is displayed in the bookmark listing.  If the data is invalid, then the default
bookmark icon should appear, it should not be left with a blank space.

Comment 21

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Resolving this bug as the patch was checked in; the issue with favicons for
bookmarks for URLs that 301 redirect is in bug 255085.

Comment 22

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 25

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Restricting comments on this long-closed bug due to spam.