806061 - 256 x 256 icon already outdated -> allow SVG icon in Open Web App manifest

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: DOM: Apps, enhancement)

Description

[Felix E. Klee]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4

Steps to reproduce:

Created an Open Web App manifest, according to:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Manifest

Provided the same icon optimized to the supported sizes: 16 x 16, 32 x 32, 48 x 48, 64 x 64,  128 x 128, 256 x 256, 30 x 30, 54 x 54, 60 x 60, 108 x 108


Actual results:

The icons work on small mobile devices. However, I am worried that on devices with a high resolution such as computer screens or TVs (HD, 4K), they are much too small to be shown during app startup. Even the 256 x 256 icon would have to be scaled up, and it would look blurry. In my case, the icon is depicting a logo with crisp edges, and it would look ugly if those edges are blurred.


Expected results:

It should be possible to specify an icon in SVG (Tiny) format.

Comment 2

[Felix E. Klee]

Jo: How is this a duplicate?

Bug 430557 is about the icon of *Firefox* itself. This bug is about icons of *Open Web Apps*, and in particular about the Open Web App manifest:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Manifest

Comment 3

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

(In reply to Felix E. Klee from comment #2)
> Jo: How is this a duplicate?
> 
> Bug 430557 is about the icon of *Firefox* itself. This bug is about icons of
> *Open Web Apps*, and in particular about the Open Web App manifest:
> 
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Manifest

Right, this isn't a dup.

Comment 4

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

This is a bug in a client using the DOM: Apps API, not a bug in the DOM: Apps API itself. DOM Apps doesn't deal with image parsing - it's the client job to figure that out. For example, Gaia's System App figures out what icon to use and how to render it on Firefox OS. In the context of Desktop, this is the responsibility of the install flow in web apps. This then falls back into the Firefox --> Web Apps component.

Comment 5

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Jason Smith [:jsmith] from comment #4)
> This is a bug in a client using the DOM: Apps API, not a bug in the DOM:
> Apps API itself. DOM Apps doesn't deal with image parsing - it's the client
> job to figure that out. For example, Gaia's System App figures out what icon
> to use and how to render it on Firefox OS. In the context of Desktop, this
> is the responsibility of the install flow in web apps. This then falls back
> into the Firefox --> Web Apps component.

It's possible that I misunderstand what the reporter is asking for, but based on the description of this bug, it sounds very much like the reporter wants a way to specify a resolution-independent SVG icon in the manifest for use by runtimes generally, not the desktop runtime specifically.

In other words, the reporter wants to be able to do something like this:

  icons: {
    "any": "/img/icon.svg"
  }

Whereas currently the icons section of the manifest documentation <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Apps/Manifest#icons> says that the "icons" field is a map of sizes to URIs, and it doesn't describe a way to specify a resolution-independent icon.

And the API implementation in AppsUtils.jsm and Webapps.jsm assumes that all keys in the field are integers:

  https://github.com/mozilla/mozilla-central/blob/2dd672a5093b13a68b5d0f893dbec155589621e1/dom/apps/src/AppsUtils.jsm#L590-L604

  https://github.com/mozilla/mozilla-central/blob/2dd672a5093b13a68b5d0f893dbec155589621e1/dom/apps/src/Webapps.jsm#L622

As does the non-runtime-specific webapps actor:

  https://github.com/mozilla/mozilla-central/blob/d9af9e87948d72a6c94501e7889d55a9133a9faf/toolkit/devtools/server/actors/webapps.js#L364


Which makes this, like bug 805845, a request to add a feature to the manifest specification for use by multiple runtimes.  It's true that the main beneficiary at the moment would be the desktop runtime, and the (unclear) benefit to the desktop runtime may be a factor in the decision; but ultimately this is a call for the folks driving the manifest specification to make.

(As with bug 805845, I also think this is a suboptimal place to be discussing such subjects.  But we need to do something with the bugs that get filed, and I defer to tchoma and others on how to handle such requests.  My sole consideration here is to make sure the bug is in the right place with the right set of eyes looking at it.)

Comment 7

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Core Graveyard / DOM: Apps is inactive. Closing all bugs in this component.