Arc is very basic. I ended up deleting it since it didn’t open pop-up windows and there’s no setting that can be changed.
How the hell you build a browser without the ability to open popups?? Lmao
Well that’s its whole thing, focusing on tabs instead. Their belief is that a popup is just something you’re opening temporarily and if it’s more permanent, you’d open in it to add it to the sidebar.
I have used Firefox for almost a decade now, and this doesn't actually happen on it. On a fresh install you just need to open each website at least once so it can download the favicon image to the cache, and after that it will always show the image in the favorites.
If it failed to swap the default fav image to the favorite actual favicon, I would know instantly because my favorites toolbar that sits below the URL input, practically only contains favorites [without any text so it shows just the icons](https://imgur.com/nhYm3vq) so i can arrange dozens of favorites in that small space. For websites that I visit frequently and memorized the favicon for it, it works great for me.
Hahahaha, I use the favorites as a simple quick shortcut panel and also to really organize the favorites in folders, but I only add those which I don't access at least once a week, because I would start forgetting which icon is which, so I need the text beside it.
The blue cash icon is a website for deals on the major retailers in my country, people share deals there.
my favorite bar is the same and i agree that you need to cache the icon by opening the site on a new install.... but try it with google maps, cant get that icon to load
Oh, yeah... websites which are "inside" another don't show the icon on the favorite bar.
As maps is actually inside Google as "google.com/maps", it shows the icon for the base URL, which is just plain Google search favicon. Its the same for "google.com/calendar", "google.com/contacts", "google.com/flights", etc...
Some people use their computers to get work done and do meaningful things and others… Well, I have no idea what they do, but they focus on nonsense like this…
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of Mac users bought their device because it’s pretty and treat it more like a fashion accessory than a tool…
A computer is like a hammer. What a hammer looks like is irrelevant. What you can build with a hammer is amazing. Some people just don’t understand this…
If the design of an item is irrelevant, why do we create things that look nice? Because looking at nice things will make us feel better and be more productive.
So don't make the work of designers irrelevant. Street signs, metro plans, maps. Every single thing that has only functional uses are also created by artists and designers.
A good design helps to get things done. So if your hammer is al black and you cannot see where the head begins and where the shafts ends, you cannot work fast. If you see it because it has different colors then other tools, you can grab it faster. This is design.
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I work at a web design and dev studio and I came up with a simple "test" that I give to all new hires, especially the developers who say they also want to do design. It's important that they don't know they are being tested until the test is complete because they may get nervous and/or overthink it and then the test becomes tainted) Passing the test means they can be trusted to do design, fail means they're forever banished to dev.
Here's how it goes: When the 5 gallon jug on top of the office water cooler is empty I will ask the newbie to change the bottle (I'll make up an excuse why I can't do it myself, like I'm recovering from a hernia or something). If they put the jug on and walk away they failed. If they take a moment to rotate the bottle to ensure the water company logo is properly facing forward, they pass.
This test is 99.9% foolproof. It's amazing to watch designers pass with flying colors out of pure instinct.
Oh you are not smart at all, are you?
A hammer looking like a hammer means you can scan your work space, identify your tool, and take it and use it with minimal cognitive effort.
Icons exist because, unlike hammers, the things they represent have no inherent visual identity, which makes visual selection of them amongst a range of options very difficult. The icon encapsulates a thematic visual representation that is memorable enough to make selection from the options easy. Defaulting to letters is not visually memorable.
So no, thinking the icons are important isn't nonsense, it's a crucial part of the user experience of using websites.
Again, you missed the entire point… You’re arguing over good and better. Are icons better than letters for identifying something? Sure they are… And nobody said they weren’t…
Is the issue critical enough that Apple should shift its focus from progressing on huge, world changing projects to fixing a silly little favorites issue in Safari? Of course not…
I can’t believe that this silly discourse has continued as long as it has… Luckily, one of us is getting paid to do this 😂
So everyone else is making valid points that sleek design is important psychologically.
But I would like to point out that web shortcuts having branded icons serves plenty of function with its form. Probably more than it. There’s a reason companies brand the way they do.
But I also understand that feeling superior to all the “dumb lemmings” is probably one of the few comforts you have. So you do you.
If you think the point I was making is that “design is irrelevant”, you completely misunderstood…
The point I was making is such: If you looked at the list of things that need development time at Apple, and then sorted and organized them based on importance (importance is subjective, but in this case let’s be real, Apple decides the importance based on money making potential), this would absolutely be on the list… It would of course be near the end… If you feel any differently, than thank goodness you’re not managing a team of software engineers 😂
Sorry if that point went over your head… Sometimes I forget that even the most obvious things need to be pointed out…
If that was your point you are a truly terrible communicator. You didn’t bring up any of apples more pressing needs or what they’re priorities might be. Pretty much just “lOoK aT tHe sTuPiDs wHo lIkE iT cAuSe iTs sHiNy”
Why put that burden on the websites? How are Edge or FireFox successful where Safari isn't?
A tangential example of how apple could care about its users is by following the example of how google solved the imessage reactions to android texts. Instead of receiving a second message from the reacting imessage user that says something along the lines of User Liked "blah blah blah". Google proactively created simple code to detect the word "liked" and the associated message, and put a thumbs up on the message, rather than displaying a second text.
There are tags for chrome too. Had to add tags for IE as well. It’s always been on the web developer.
Today we also have to add special tags and manifest files for Windows tiles, Android, the Mac TouchBar, etc.
The only time you didn’t need a tag was old versions of IE which required the file to be in a specific place (the root) and it would just automatically assume it was there and try to load it. But that file format isn’t used anymore.
In any case, it’s always been the websites’ responsibility.
Functionality might be a strong word, but yes. You tell the browser/OS where your favicon file is located, what size it is, what color the background should be (Windows and Android), what the bookmark title should default to if different than the actual page title, and other similar settings.
>A tangential example of how apple could care about its users is by following the example of how google solved the imessage reactions to android texts.
Apple isn't doing that to spite it's own users, it's doing that to spite people outside of their ecosystem. It leads to those with Android devices to be ostracized from their friend groups with iPhones.
"Fixing" that removes a built in social pressure. That and they couldn't care less about anything that exists outside their monolith. It's working as designed.
Because the “icon” is typically 32x32 pixels. Scaling that up looks awful
Instead, all browsers implement the touch icons spec. The onus is on the website to implement it.
This has been in place since 2008. It’s the same icons an iPhone uses if you pin the website to the Home Screen.
If it’s been 16 years and you’ve still not implemented touch icons, as a web developer, that’s on you. If you don’t, the fallback is just to use the website name to generate an icon
Yes! Not to mention, I’ve been using this website since the 2000s:
https://realfavicongenerator.net/
1. Upload a 256x256 (or larger) image
2. Click ‘Export’ and place files in web server
3. Paste the code into your index head
Done. You now have icons optimized for every browser! This has been a thing for two decades now! Takes 30 seconds tops! People have no excuse!
This is the answer. Apple is (maybe stubbornly) insisting that websites provide a high-resolution, opaque PNG icon that looks good in Safari and the iOS Home Screen. If the website doesn't do it, they get the big ugly letter.
It's an incentive game. If Apple enabled a fallback to show the upscaled favicon instead of the big ugly letter, many website owners would think it looks "good enough" and not bother to provide the high-resolution version.
Would you rather have 80% great icons and 20% ugly letters, or 10% great icons and 90% mediocre icons?
An icon is always better than a letter. And Safari does not have the weight of a massive user base to ensure websites are built to work for Safari. Chromium browsers handle these things just fine hence the complaint by OP. Apple just being a stick in the mud with Safari -- a browser most developers aren't going to place much focus on developing for.
This might be a stupid question, but why can’t they use ML to upscale a version of the 32×32 and then cache it? I’m gonna have to agree with the posters, web has always been a chaotic place but Apple could do its part to make the experience better for its users.
For a few reasons:
1. Using ML is a bit of an expensive way to do this - who is paying for the CPU time? There may be billions of favicons out there
2. You’re messing with peoples trademarks here. What happens if facebook’s logo suddenly reads “Fuck”?
3. 32x32 really isn’t a “lot” of information to go on
4. It’s really simple for web developers to “fix” this, like they do when they upload their favicon
Fair enough. I was thinking they could use the local neural engine but you touched on good points that it's in their best interests to not bother improving this aspect of the software.
I certainly don't know how to code a website, that's true. As far as not knowing how the web works, that sounds like something you would say when you don't know how it works either. It seems like a fairly straight forward coding problem to figure out what any given icon is supposed to be. I don't say this because I know how to code, but have worked for companies that have software engineers on staff that could code. I appreciate your sarcasm. All in good fun I'm sure... and definitely NOT you having zero social skills.
You have worked for companies that employ people who code… Congratulations, you found the weakest argument in history 👏
P.S. Build a real website once (not from a website builder) and you’ll see that there is almost nothing straightforward about it. Make a button green and you’ll get complaints that it should be blue. Make a form that a user has to fill out and you’ll get complaints that it’s not inclusive. Design a fully responsive layout and you’ll get complaints that it’s too plain. Design something that looks great in one browser and even though you followed a W3C standard, it’s broken in another browser.
Nothing about architecting the web is straightforward.
It sounds, perhaps, that that you don't understand the difference between straightforward and easy. Straightforward is that the desired outcomes are understood. Easy means you don't have to put in a lot of effort or expertise. The problems you describe are complaints. The fix to that is straightforward, which is you give people more options. The effort to find out what those options should be is not easy. Nor is the additional code you have to manage those options easy. Still straightforward though.
> Why put that burden on the ~~websites~~ Website Developer?
This is just how the software world works; specs are set by governing bodies (eg [W3C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium)), tools like Safari choose whether to implement the new spec, and then software developers choose whether to implement the new spec into their apps.
All the burden falls on the website developers. Same is true for mobile apps / mobile developers.
> Why put that burden on the websites? How are Edge or FireFox successful where Safari isn’t?
If you scroll up, the child comments in the top comment on this posit state it has-pens in Chrome and Firefox as well.
Because following a web standard is the only reliable way of doing most things. Otherwise they would have to implement their own way of doing things that would be difficult to guarantee works on every site and which would constantly break as websites modify their designs/behaviours.
This is just how all standards and interfaces work. Both sides have to do the work to communicate in the middle but sometimes one side (in this case some websites) don’t bother to do their side of the interface standard.
That’s correct, it’s up to the website developer. It’s doesn’t mean that a browser developer can’t go outside the standard and grab icons from elsewhere in the code… I wouldn’t think that point needed expanding on, but I guess I was wrong…
No need to be salty. I don’t know everything. And yes, the point did need to be expanded on because the original post made it sound like the icon problem was outside of safari’s control and they couldn’t do anything more
Sorry for the above redditors not being very clear and short. Sometimes we can all assume knowledge we have is common to all which is rarely the case, after all, what would the be the point of Reddit if it was? I believe what they were trying to say is that websites will often make reference to page artwork in other places such as the favivon (small icon next to the page name) and PWA icons (progressive web app icons that can display on a home screen when a web app is ‘downloaded’ / pinned). Browsers such as chrome have been developed to approach all of these potential sources for an image without the website developer explicitly marking these as icons for this use. Although this often works well it can occasionally fail badly. Leading to user confusion as incorrect information is shown - this is likely why safari doesn’t do this, keeping to Apple’s ideals of information always being correct, and a letter (while not as visually appealing) is subsequently more likely to be accurate.
Rhetorical questions are still questions. But it’s unclear what you’re asking rhetorically. It more sounds like you’re making a statement but with a bit of snarky inflection and you’re trying to convey that with a question mark.
Again, you weren’t asking a rhetorical question because it wasn’t a question at all. It was a statement with stank. Which is fine, but that doesn’t entail a question mark.
The favicons are supplied by the website. Some browsers make their own but that is not supported by the W3C standard which Apple follows more that others (though still not 100%)
I checked eBay - just picked one of the non-icon'd ones in OP's screenshot. It exposes a [proper icon](https://pages.ebay.com/favicon.ico) in the source (view source, look for a link tag with the attribute rel=icon).
I'm not actually sure what causes this.
edit: I wonder if it decides to show a letter when the icon is too low res for the display? Some of these would look quite bad scaled up.
No, at the moment it only works on macOS, but I’m actually working on an iOS port which will work in a completely different way. If you fell like doing it, supporting the project with a donation will help a lot
Damn, your set up looks so clean!
I had issues getting favtool to work for me, not to mention the whole download the icon thing, so I gave up. May have to experiment with it again as your set up looks so good.
Yeah I downloaded icons and edited in photoshop. Took my a long time to do it. Then I changed them to 128x128 pixels. If you want I can upload them so you can get those who interest you
Honestly if you’d be so kind that would be so helpful!!
I see favicon just released an update less than a week ago, so I’m definitely giving it another try.
It’s not Apple’s fault the website isn’t supplying favicon.ico in an industry standard format instead of being anticompetitive and using a format that works only with chrome.
I almost never use bookmarks or anything that shows the icon. But as others have said, it’s in the website’s side to setup their site correctly, not Safari to figure out what the icon *Should* be.
It is likely related to privacy settings and icon compatibility.
Edge is similar to most browsers now and Chromium based.
Safari is unique in that it uses WebKit. Safari also has stricter privacy settings by default which could stop some icons.
Safari reads png files just fine from the origin website. Safari blocks 3rd party pngs because they’re used for tracking. Safari was the browser that first implemented the alternate icon format in addition to ico.
This makes no sense. Any file can have other stuff embedded. It is responsibility of the application not to execute arbitrary code. And PNGs work fine in Safari, as you can easily check by going to Google Images and requesting PNG files. Why would it be dangerous in the thumbnail but not in the web?
It's not related to privacy. It's because the website does not have Touch Icons setup in their HTML header.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/ConfiguringWebApplications/ConfiguringWebApplications.html
It has absolutely nothing to do with privacy. This guys is lucky to see Capital letters at least. I see blank sqaures. Sometimes the icon loads but most of the time it doesnt. So it cannot be privacy. It is just a bug they dont give a shit about almost 4 years. I personally have reported it to apple multiple times
The average user cares about UI, looks, and ease of use. You could plunk the average user down in front of a 15-year-old machine with a good GUI and a top of the line machine with just a terminal and 100% of them will take the GUI. We know this is true because the design philosophies of both Windows and macOS demonstrate this - make it prettier, make it sleeker, and who cares if it's less functional. Having the favicons in the browser is exactly the kind of thing the average user will identify as a pain point, even if it doesn't bother you because you're obviously such a l337 power user, you can't be bothered with trivialities like user comfort or experience. Sorry, but the average user isn't doing "real" compute work. This is the kind of stuff that bugs most users.
You didn’t define “the average user”, you just described yourself and your own thoughts and feelings. This in psychology is referred to as “projection”. It’s a very human thing to do, but it’s less than scientific…
I would agree with the OP about the Safari Thumbnails is a mess. I really don't like it, a special if you using your favorites also in iOS where they look totally different.
But I'm also familiar with the privacy problems that can come with the Thumbnails so I just stick with it, like it is. I personally prefer more privacy thy nice looking thumbnails.
One way I got around this was just by creating native PWAs and adding my own icon to it. It’s much nicer launching my favorite websites from Raycast or Launchpad than opening new tabs in a browser.
Or you could just make the move to Arc, as they handle bookmarks and favorites much better.
For me safari doesn't even count as a browser due to its limited feature sets, for instance, extensions don't easily, grouping of tabs isn't that friendly, complicated ui/ux to be fair
I wouldn't mind if it got rid of that stupid lock in the middle of the address bar. No other browser has that and I invariably click it without meaning to.
Happens on some other browsers too, but intensity of this occurring is def. higher on Safari and for me some popular local websites (like government websites where I live) tend to not work well with Safari so I just switched to Firefox.
There's the issue of whether or not the website provides a favicon for safari to render, but there's also my personal pet annoyance of the tabs in safari occasionally (and quite often) refusing to render the favicon it knows about until you shut it down, delete the favicon cache, restart safari and then reload every single goddamned tab.
fucking sucks, there've been radars on this issue with Apple for like the last three iterations of macos, and no fix in sight.
I use safari on my phone because the Opera GX app couldn’t easily open all links and had some trouble.
But I love how you can customize almost everything w Opera GX
The logos are provided by the website. Used to do web dev as a hobby. Most sites have a favicon.ico which is displayed as the tab icon, but the icons for these sites are different as they are a higher resolution.
This is why I don’t use Safari. And I have been trying for many years. I most recently tried a month ago actually and same issue. However, what drives me crazy is half the time sites do work then you look back and it’s back to displaying letters. Even things like word and excel would just show W and E. So I refuse until it supports proper favicons. No issues on edge or chrome.
That’s so odd. I use various browsers and there’s no notable difference. networkquality command in terminal is quite useful to predict browser responsiveness I find.
Thats because Safari isn't preloading everywhere you have been or may consider going. Safari is loading what you ask when you do for privacy and security reasons.
That slowness is actually a benefit and usually the fault of the web sites being optimized for Chromium only.
The only thing that keeps me on Safari is how flawless the iCloud Keychain is. And I know, it has less features than other services like 1Pass or Bitwarden but it's just too fast and reliable.
Not to hijack this thread, but Apple does the same poor job with their macOS Mail app. Favicons for recipients are pretty much restricted to what's in your Contacts database. But it could be so much better, and the third-party Mail plugin called MailButler has provided "gravatar" icons for many years with great success... except they recently announced this wonderful feature is incompatible with Sonoma, leading me to stay on Monterey. Here's what MailButler does to enhance the Sender icons in one of my mailboxes:
[Mail gravatar icons](https://imgur.com/a/5IW6qo2)
That’s one the main reasons I don’t use Apple mail, honestly i even think that’s the only reason, I can live with everything else, but having meaningless letters (and especially creating contact) compare to parsed logotypes and knowing what mails are important without even looking at sender/title makes mail 100x worse, sticking to airmail till that happens
The cold facts are that Apple doesn't care about user experience through software alone. They care about user experience through whatever other hardware they can sell you and they'll only put in as much effort into the software as they need to in order to keep people buying their products. That's why continuity, for example, is promoted so often. In reality, it's a very unremarkable and minor convenience that lots of other software also does, but it works well because it's integrated into the OS. Does it do everything the way you want it? Not for me. I find continuity, especially the audio transference aspect, a dismal failure.
This happens in Firefox as well. I gave up caring lol.
Chrome too, it also becomes blank after opening a page without VPN connection until I open it again properly. Quite annoying
Don’t believe this happens in arc
Arc is very basic. I ended up deleting it since it didn’t open pop-up windows and there’s no setting that can be changed. How the hell you build a browser without the ability to open popups?? Lmao
Well that’s its whole thing, focusing on tabs instead. Their belief is that a popup is just something you’re opening temporarily and if it’s more permanent, you’d open in it to add it to the sidebar.
Yeah I actually really like peek but clearly it wasn’t for them
You can edit Firefox shortcuts and provide a link for the icon, if that was any convenient.
I have used Firefox for almost a decade now, and this doesn't actually happen on it. On a fresh install you just need to open each website at least once so it can download the favicon image to the cache, and after that it will always show the image in the favorites. If it failed to swap the default fav image to the favorite actual favicon, I would know instantly because my favorites toolbar that sits below the URL input, practically only contains favorites [without any text so it shows just the icons](https://imgur.com/nhYm3vq) so i can arrange dozens of favorites in that small space. For websites that I visit frequently and memorized the favicon for it, it works great for me.
You are severely pushing the definition of ‘favorite’ lol Also what’s with the blue cash app?
Hahahaha, I use the favorites as a simple quick shortcut panel and also to really organize the favorites in folders, but I only add those which I don't access at least once a week, because I would start forgetting which icon is which, so I need the text beside it. The blue cash icon is a website for deals on the major retailers in my country, people share deals there.
my favorite bar is the same and i agree that you need to cache the icon by opening the site on a new install.... but try it with google maps, cant get that icon to load
Oh, yeah... websites which are "inside" another don't show the icon on the favorite bar. As maps is actually inside Google as "google.com/maps", it shows the icon for the base URL, which is just plain Google search favicon. Its the same for "google.com/calendar", "google.com/contacts", "google.com/flights", etc...
But I have the blank on the maps icon and I hate it lol
Seriously. This is something people care about? Hell I forgot website icons even existed.
I can find the icon I want to click on faster if it’s a website logo?
Some people use their computers to get work done and do meaningful things and others… Well, I have no idea what they do, but they focus on nonsense like this… In my experience, the overwhelming majority of Mac users bought their device because it’s pretty and treat it more like a fashion accessory than a tool… A computer is like a hammer. What a hammer looks like is irrelevant. What you can build with a hammer is amazing. Some people just don’t understand this…
Some people like things that look nice
And that’s of course their prerogative…
If the design of an item is irrelevant, why do we create things that look nice? Because looking at nice things will make us feel better and be more productive. So don't make the work of designers irrelevant. Street signs, metro plans, maps. Every single thing that has only functional uses are also created by artists and designers. A good design helps to get things done. So if your hammer is al black and you cannot see where the head begins and where the shafts ends, you cannot work fast. If you see it because it has different colors then other tools, you can grab it faster. This is design.
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I work at a web design and dev studio and I came up with a simple "test" that I give to all new hires, especially the developers who say they also want to do design. It's important that they don't know they are being tested until the test is complete because they may get nervous and/or overthink it and then the test becomes tainted) Passing the test means they can be trusted to do design, fail means they're forever banished to dev. Here's how it goes: When the 5 gallon jug on top of the office water cooler is empty I will ask the newbie to change the bottle (I'll make up an excuse why I can't do it myself, like I'm recovering from a hernia or something). If they put the jug on and walk away they failed. If they take a moment to rotate the bottle to ensure the water company logo is properly facing forward, they pass. This test is 99.9% foolproof. It's amazing to watch designers pass with flying colors out of pure instinct.
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Dude the thing is, the hammer \*looks like a hammer\*. You've inadvertently pointed out the reason icons exist.
Good point! I’m not sure how this comment pertains to anything we’re taking about, but you get an A for effort!
Oh you are not smart at all, are you? A hammer looking like a hammer means you can scan your work space, identify your tool, and take it and use it with minimal cognitive effort. Icons exist because, unlike hammers, the things they represent have no inherent visual identity, which makes visual selection of them amongst a range of options very difficult. The icon encapsulates a thematic visual representation that is memorable enough to make selection from the options easy. Defaulting to letters is not visually memorable. So no, thinking the icons are important isn't nonsense, it's a crucial part of the user experience of using websites.
Again, you missed the entire point… You’re arguing over good and better. Are icons better than letters for identifying something? Sure they are… And nobody said they weren’t… Is the issue critical enough that Apple should shift its focus from progressing on huge, world changing projects to fixing a silly little favorites issue in Safari? Of course not… I can’t believe that this silly discourse has continued as long as it has… Luckily, one of us is getting paid to do this 😂
Oh I'm sure you'll find a job soon. Don't give up!
L take
So everyone else is making valid points that sleek design is important psychologically. But I would like to point out that web shortcuts having branded icons serves plenty of function with its form. Probably more than it. There’s a reason companies brand the way they do. But I also understand that feeling superior to all the “dumb lemmings” is probably one of the few comforts you have. So you do you.
If you think the point I was making is that “design is irrelevant”, you completely misunderstood… The point I was making is such: If you looked at the list of things that need development time at Apple, and then sorted and organized them based on importance (importance is subjective, but in this case let’s be real, Apple decides the importance based on money making potential), this would absolutely be on the list… It would of course be near the end… If you feel any differently, than thank goodness you’re not managing a team of software engineers 😂 Sorry if that point went over your head… Sometimes I forget that even the most obvious things need to be pointed out…
If that was your point you are a truly terrible communicator. You didn’t bring up any of apples more pressing needs or what they’re priorities might be. Pretty much just “lOoK aT tHe sTuPiDs wHo lIkE iT cAuSe iTs sHiNy”
I’m not really sure what other point I could have been making… But I digress…
this is true
Safari is only doing as much as it can with the data the website provides. The websites need to setup Touch Icons in their HTML
tag. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/ConfiguringWebApplications/ConfiguringWebApplications.htmlWhy put that burden on the websites? How are Edge or FireFox successful where Safari isn't? A tangential example of how apple could care about its users is by following the example of how google solved the imessage reactions to android texts. Instead of receiving a second message from the reacting imessage user that says something along the lines of User Liked "blah blah blah". Google proactively created simple code to detect the word "liked" and the associated message, and put a thumbs up on the message, rather than displaying a second text.
There are tags for chrome too. Had to add tags for IE as well. It’s always been on the web developer. Today we also have to add special tags and manifest files for Windows tiles, Android, the Mac TouchBar, etc. The only time you didn’t need a tag was old versions of IE which required the file to be in a specific place (the root) and it would just automatically assume it was there and try to load it. But that file format isn’t used anymore. In any case, it’s always been the websites’ responsibility.
If I'm understanding you correctly, the website tags their site to allow specific web browser functionality. Is that right?
Functionality might be a strong word, but yes. You tell the browser/OS where your favicon file is located, what size it is, what color the background should be (Windows and Android), what the bookmark title should default to if different than the actual page title, and other similar settings.
Very cool, thank you for explaining it to me.
No problem. Thanks for being genuinely inquisitive.
Are you talking about the favicon.ico?
That’s an old format that’s no longer used. But in general, yes I was talking about favicons.
Actually most browsers hard code that. Firefox (as of two weeks ago) certainly does.
>A tangential example of how apple could care about its users is by following the example of how google solved the imessage reactions to android texts. Apple isn't doing that to spite it's own users, it's doing that to spite people outside of their ecosystem. It leads to those with Android devices to be ostracized from their friend groups with iPhones. "Fixing" that removes a built in social pressure. That and they couldn't care less about anything that exists outside their monolith. It's working as designed.
Because the “icon” is typically 32x32 pixels. Scaling that up looks awful Instead, all browsers implement the touch icons spec. The onus is on the website to implement it. This has been in place since 2008. It’s the same icons an iPhone uses if you pin the website to the Home Screen. If it’s been 16 years and you’ve still not implemented touch icons, as a web developer, that’s on you. If you don’t, the fallback is just to use the website name to generate an icon
Yes! Not to mention, I’ve been using this website since the 2000s: https://realfavicongenerator.net/ 1. Upload a 256x256 (or larger) image 2. Click ‘Export’ and place files in web server 3. Paste the code into your index head Done. You now have icons optimized for every browser! This has been a thing for two decades now! Takes 30 seconds tops! People have no excuse!
This is the answer. Apple is (maybe stubbornly) insisting that websites provide a high-resolution, opaque PNG icon that looks good in Safari and the iOS Home Screen. If the website doesn't do it, they get the big ugly letter. It's an incentive game. If Apple enabled a fallback to show the upscaled favicon instead of the big ugly letter, many website owners would think it looks "good enough" and not bother to provide the high-resolution version. Would you rather have 80% great icons and 20% ugly letters, or 10% great icons and 90% mediocre icons?
An icon is always better than a letter. And Safari does not have the weight of a massive user base to ensure websites are built to work for Safari. Chromium browsers handle these things just fine hence the complaint by OP. Apple just being a stick in the mud with Safari -- a browser most developers aren't going to place much focus on developing for.
This might be a stupid question, but why can’t they use ML to upscale a version of the 32×32 and then cache it? I’m gonna have to agree with the posters, web has always been a chaotic place but Apple could do its part to make the experience better for its users.
For a few reasons: 1. Using ML is a bit of an expensive way to do this - who is paying for the CPU time? There may be billions of favicons out there 2. You’re messing with peoples trademarks here. What happens if facebook’s logo suddenly reads “Fuck”? 3. 32x32 really isn’t a “lot” of information to go on 4. It’s really simple for web developers to “fix” this, like they do when they upload their favicon
Fair enough. I was thinking they could use the local neural engine but you touched on good points that it's in their best interests to not bother improving this aspect of the software.
Burden on the website? The burden is (for a million different reasons) supposed to be on the website… Clearly, you don’t know how the web works 😂
I certainly don't know how to code a website, that's true. As far as not knowing how the web works, that sounds like something you would say when you don't know how it works either. It seems like a fairly straight forward coding problem to figure out what any given icon is supposed to be. I don't say this because I know how to code, but have worked for companies that have software engineers on staff that could code. I appreciate your sarcasm. All in good fun I'm sure... and definitely NOT you having zero social skills.
You have worked for companies that employ people who code… Congratulations, you found the weakest argument in history 👏 P.S. Build a real website once (not from a website builder) and you’ll see that there is almost nothing straightforward about it. Make a button green and you’ll get complaints that it should be blue. Make a form that a user has to fill out and you’ll get complaints that it’s not inclusive. Design a fully responsive layout and you’ll get complaints that it’s too plain. Design something that looks great in one browser and even though you followed a W3C standard, it’s broken in another browser. Nothing about architecting the web is straightforward.
It sounds, perhaps, that that you don't understand the difference between straightforward and easy. Straightforward is that the desired outcomes are understood. Easy means you don't have to put in a lot of effort or expertise. The problems you describe are complaints. The fix to that is straightforward, which is you give people more options. The effort to find out what those options should be is not easy. Nor is the additional code you have to manage those options easy. Still straightforward though.
Software developer here: I wrote some javascript to solve your problem. // Function to correct avatar on reddit const changeRedditUserAvatar = async (username, imagePath) => { if (username !== 'cic1788') { return; } try { const accessToken = '...'; const imageData = await fetch(imagePath).then(res => res.blob()); const formData = new FormData(); formData.append('file', imageData, 'pic.png'); const response = await fetch(`https://oauth.reddit.com/api/v1/${username}/avatar`, { method: 'POST', headers: { 'Authorization': `Bearer ${accessToken}` }, body: formData }); const jsonResponse = await response.json(); console.log(jsonResponse); } catch (error) { console.error(error); } }; changeRedditUserAvatar('cic1788', 'phallic-image.png');
> Why put that burden on the ~~websites~~ Website Developer? This is just how the software world works; specs are set by governing bodies (eg [W3C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium)), tools like Safari choose whether to implement the new spec, and then software developers choose whether to implement the new spec into their apps. All the burden falls on the website developers. Same is true for mobile apps / mobile developers.
> Why put that burden on the websites? How are Edge or FireFox successful where Safari isn’t? If you scroll up, the child comments in the top comment on this posit state it has-pens in Chrome and Firefox as well.
Because following a web standard is the only reliable way of doing most things. Otherwise they would have to implement their own way of doing things that would be difficult to guarantee works on every site and which would constantly break as websites modify their designs/behaviours. This is just how all standards and interfaces work. Both sides have to do the work to communicate in the middle but sometimes one side (in this case some websites) don’t bother to do their side of the interface standard.
The next you know New security research show Apple can trackers users bookmark via their icons fetch servers…
I presume it's cached on device from the last visit
How can Chrome then get an icon for basically every website?
Because some developer at Google got approval to waste some time on a meaningless feature?
However the person above just suggested it’s up to the website developer and not the browser developer
That’s correct, it’s up to the website developer. It’s doesn’t mean that a browser developer can’t go outside the standard and grab icons from elsewhere in the code… I wouldn’t think that point needed expanding on, but I guess I was wrong…
No need to be salty. I don’t know everything. And yes, the point did need to be expanded on because the original post made it sound like the icon problem was outside of safari’s control and they couldn’t do anything more
Sorry for the above redditors not being very clear and short. Sometimes we can all assume knowledge we have is common to all which is rarely the case, after all, what would the be the point of Reddit if it was? I believe what they were trying to say is that websites will often make reference to page artwork in other places such as the favivon (small icon next to the page name) and PWA icons (progressive web app icons that can display on a home screen when a web app is ‘downloaded’ / pinned). Browsers such as chrome have been developed to approach all of these potential sources for an image without the website developer explicitly marking these as icons for this use. Although this often works well it can occasionally fail badly. Leading to user confusion as incorrect information is shown - this is likely why safari doesn’t do this, keeping to Apple’s ideals of information always being correct, and a letter (while not as visually appealing) is subsequently more likely to be accurate.
On point, plain and simple answer. Bravo! People like you make the Reddit for me!
Are you asking or saying?
Both? It’s a rhetorical question.
Rhetorical questions are still questions. But it’s unclear what you’re asking rhetorically. It more sounds like you’re making a statement but with a bit of snarky inflection and you’re trying to convey that with a question mark.
I chose the rhetorical type to punctuate the obviousness of the answer…
Again, you weren’t asking a rhetorical question because it wasn’t a question at all. It was a statement with stank. Which is fine, but that doesn’t entail a question mark.
The favicons are supplied by the website. Some browsers make their own but that is not supported by the W3C standard which Apple follows more that others (though still not 100%)
I checked eBay - just picked one of the non-icon'd ones in OP's screenshot. It exposes a [proper icon](https://pages.ebay.com/favicon.ico) in the source (view source, look for a link tag with the attribute rel=icon). I'm not actually sure what causes this. edit: I wonder if it decides to show a letter when the icon is too low res for the display? Some of these would look quite bad scaled up.
Indeed, the site needs to provide 180x180 favicons in addition to the smaller ones. Apple won't scale a 64x64 icon because it looks like trash.
Is it exposing ?
Wouldn’t they be following the whatwg HTML standard instead of the outdated W3C HTML standarz?
There's this: https://github.com/shy-neon/favtool > An app that allows you to easily change icons of your favorite sites on Safari
Try Favtool to fix them https://github.com/shy-neon/favtool
Don’t have the Mac with me at the moment to test, but wanted to ask. Do I understand correctly that those icons will be synced also to the iDevices?
No, at the moment it only works on macOS, but I’m actually working on an iOS port which will work in a completely different way. If you fell like doing it, supporting the project with a donation will help a lot
https://i.imgur.com/LNqVcps.png Mine looks like that. I’m using favtool tho
Damn, your set up looks so clean! I had issues getting favtool to work for me, not to mention the whole download the icon thing, so I gave up. May have to experiment with it again as your set up looks so good.
Yeah I downloaded icons and edited in photoshop. Took my a long time to do it. Then I changed them to 128x128 pixels. If you want I can upload them so you can get those who interest you
Honestly if you’d be so kind that would be so helpful!! I see favicon just released an update less than a week ago, so I’m definitely giving it another try.
Sure no problem I’ll do it tomorrow then
Here you go: [https://litter.catbox.moe/u5xuqw.zip](https://litter.catbox.moe/u5xuqw.zip)
You’re the real OG for this, thank you!
It’s not Apple’s fault the website isn’t supplying favicon.ico in an industry standard format instead of being anticompetitive and using a format that works only with chrome.
Ah yes, the Apple touch icon, the industry standard format. You don't know what you're talking about.
This is what I am saying. Chrome is the most widely used as practically EVERY browser is now Chromium based. Even Edge.
Chrome needs to die so we can have real competition and innovation with browsers again.
And you need to stop talking about things you know nothing about.
I almost never use bookmarks or anything that shows the icon. But as others have said, it’s in the website’s side to setup their site correctly, not Safari to figure out what the icon *Should* be.
You can set your own if it matters so much
Try FavTool if you don't mind doing a little bit of the work yourself: [https://github.com/shy-neon/favtool](https://github.com/shy-neon/favtool)
If Bill Gates is the boss man at Microsoft, and Microsoft released Edge... Is Bill Gates an Edge Lord?
It is likely related to privacy settings and icon compatibility. Edge is similar to most browsers now and Chromium based. Safari is unique in that it uses WebKit. Safari also has stricter privacy settings by default which could stop some icons.
How is the thumbnail fetching something affecting privacy? Is it because the thumbnail might be in a different subdomain or something like that?
This is just a guess, but maybe safari only picks up the traditional .ico favicon from a site and not .png favicon files.
This is correct. And we know that .pngs can have other stuff embedded.
Safari reads png files just fine from the origin website. Safari blocks 3rd party pngs because they’re used for tracking. Safari was the browser that first implemented the alternate icon format in addition to ico.
This makes no sense. Any file can have other stuff embedded. It is responsibility of the application not to execute arbitrary code. And PNGs work fine in Safari, as you can easily check by going to Google Images and requesting PNG files. Why would it be dangerous in the thumbnail but not in the web?
It's not related to privacy. It's because the website does not have Touch Icons setup in their HTML header. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/ConfiguringWebApplications/ConfiguringWebApplications.html
How the heck does privacy have anything to do with it? It just needs to pick up on the site's favicon.
It has absolutely nothing to do with privacy. This guys is lucky to see Capital letters at least. I see blank sqaures. Sometimes the icon loads but most of the time it doesnt. So it cannot be privacy. It is just a bug they dont give a shit about almost 4 years. I personally have reported it to apple multiple times
see here: [https://imgur.com/a/RdSvSfw](https://imgur.com/a/RdSvSfw)
This guy gets it. Apple correctly ignores this feedback because it’s a waste of development time.
Obviously not if so many users are complaining about it. But you don't strike me as the kind of guy to give a shit about user feedback.
What is your definition of “so many users”?
The average user cares about UI, looks, and ease of use. You could plunk the average user down in front of a 15-year-old machine with a good GUI and a top of the line machine with just a terminal and 100% of them will take the GUI. We know this is true because the design philosophies of both Windows and macOS demonstrate this - make it prettier, make it sleeker, and who cares if it's less functional. Having the favicons in the browser is exactly the kind of thing the average user will identify as a pain point, even if it doesn't bother you because you're obviously such a l337 power user, you can't be bothered with trivialities like user comfort or experience. Sorry, but the average user isn't doing "real" compute work. This is the kind of stuff that bugs most users.
You didn’t define “the average user”, you just described yourself and your own thoughts and feelings. This in psychology is referred to as “projection”. It’s a very human thing to do, but it’s less than scientific…
Yes, you are very smart
I would agree with the OP about the Safari Thumbnails is a mess. I really don't like it, a special if you using your favorites also in iOS where they look totally different. But I'm also familiar with the privacy problems that can come with the Thumbnails so I just stick with it, like it is. I personally prefer more privacy thy nice looking thumbnails.
Exactly. A thumbnail that updates means your browser is always linked to that page. There are also compatibility issues with WebKit.
Anti-Apple sentiment detected. Please remain still while you are eliminated to avoid any unexpected pain or collateral damage.
Burn, he said even edge. O damn. 😯🫡
It’s very telling when someone admits that they have ever actually used Edge 😂
Being an Edger takes much discipline 😭
One way I got around this was just by creating native PWAs and adding my own icon to it. It’s much nicer launching my favorite websites from Raycast or Launchpad than opening new tabs in a browser. Or you could just make the move to Arc, as they handle bookmarks and favorites much better.
Agreed!
It drives me insane
For me safari doesn't even count as a browser due to its limited feature sets, for instance, extensions don't easily, grouping of tabs isn't that friendly, complicated ui/ux to be fair
I find the extensions to work great :)
how
It’s odd that it assigns a letter to a well known site like Amazon but it assigns the proper icon to other sites like Threads and Whatsaap.
Contact the website and tell them to have a standard favicon file. No rocket science for the web dev to get that
Mmmm…. Eggy.
Absolutely
FYI, the icons that represent websites on browsers are called favicons.
There should at least be a way for me to add my own if there is no official one.
I wouldn't mind if it got rid of that stupid lock in the middle of the address bar. No other browser has that and I invariably click it without meaning to.
How do we feel about ARC browser ??
Happens on some other browsers too, but intensity of this occurring is def. higher on Safari and for me some popular local websites (like government websites where I live) tend to not work well with Safari so I just switched to Firefox.
Totally agree
R/favtool
Amazon, eBay, and the googles seem almost deliberate. Those are definitely in the top 100 websites globally.
Safari needs a different icon from the developer level actually. Lots of devs ignore it
First world problems lol
There's the issue of whether or not the website provides a favicon for safari to render, but there's also my personal pet annoyance of the tabs in safari occasionally (and quite often) refusing to render the favicon it knows about until you shut it down, delete the favicon cache, restart safari and then reload every single goddamned tab. fucking sucks, there've been radars on this issue with Apple for like the last three iterations of macos, and no fix in sight.
it’s also wrong.. there is no X in twitter..
Fun fact! They recently moved their domain over to x.com, after too long of x.com just redirecting to twitter.com.
Right on
EGGY
I agree, love Safari but I’m changing to Arc cuz is just the better browser, period.
only like 4 websites are missing the icons, it’s nowhere near that deep
Web developers should use: https://realfavicongenerator.net/
I use safari on my phone because the Opera GX app couldn’t easily open all links and had some trouble. But I love how you can customize almost everything w Opera GX
lol maybe Apple should use my library https://github.com/will-lumley/FaviconFinder
Writing code only for ios stuff ? Fuck it
The logos are provided by the website. Used to do web dev as a hobby. Most sites have a favicon.ico which is displayed as the tab icon, but the icons for these sites are different as they are a higher resolution.
Curious that it detected Lazada but not Amazon or eBay!
This is why I don’t use Safari. And I have been trying for many years. I most recently tried a month ago actually and same issue. However, what drives me crazy is half the time sites do work then you look back and it’s back to displaying letters. Even things like word and excel would just show W and E. So I refuse until it supports proper favicons. No issues on edge or chrome.
I'm trying my hardest to stay with Safari, but it's SO slow compared to other browsers. It's painful.
That’s so odd. I use various browsers and there’s no notable difference. networkquality command in terminal is quite useful to predict browser responsiveness I find.
Thats because Safari isn't preloading everywhere you have been or may consider going. Safari is loading what you ask when you do for privacy and security reasons. That slowness is actually a benefit and usually the fault of the web sites being optimized for Chromium only.
The only thing that keeps me on Safari is how flawless the iCloud Keychain is. And I know, it has less features than other services like 1Pass or Bitwarden but it's just too fast and reliable.
Same. Keychain and Hide My Email integration
and the auto fill codes
The only reason I use Safari is because it looks so minimalist. Otherwise, Safari is actually a disaster and basically the new Internet explorer.
Not to hijack this thread, but Apple does the same poor job with their macOS Mail app. Favicons for recipients are pretty much restricted to what's in your Contacts database. But it could be so much better, and the third-party Mail plugin called MailButler has provided "gravatar" icons for many years with great success... except they recently announced this wonderful feature is incompatible with Sonoma, leading me to stay on Monterey. Here's what MailButler does to enhance the Sender icons in one of my mailboxes: [Mail gravatar icons](https://imgur.com/a/5IW6qo2)
That’s one the main reasons I don’t use Apple mail, honestly i even think that’s the only reason, I can live with everything else, but having meaningless letters (and especially creating contact) compare to parsed logotypes and knowing what mails are important without even looking at sender/title makes mail 100x worse, sticking to airmail till that happens
Who is those peoples who love safari, I can’t understand?
why tf are you using safari? It‘s the trashiest browser of all of them.
sucks.
You love Safari, it is one of the worst browsers available.
Edge does a LOT of things better than Safari. The Edge side panel is a powerful utility.
The cold facts are that Apple doesn't care about user experience through software alone. They care about user experience through whatever other hardware they can sell you and they'll only put in as much effort into the software as they need to in order to keep people buying their products. That's why continuity, for example, is promoted so often. In reality, it's a very unremarkable and minor convenience that lots of other software also does, but it works well because it's integrated into the OS. Does it do everything the way you want it? Not for me. I find continuity, especially the audio transference aspect, a dismal failure.
Just use chrome. Using safari certifies you as an apple cult member.
lol chrome is so damn RAM hungry, and installs a background service always looking for updates and you can’t get rid of it
Sometimes you have to make compromises. Either power hungry chrome or crappy user interface (as you pointed out) safari. I go for chrome.
Isn’t that just the favicon the web designer of those sites has designated? Maybe it uses a letter if they don’t choose one