Peter Trudelle wrote: > One benefit is that users can tell, at a glance, the current site, and > which site such bookmarks came from, much faster than they could ever > read the URL. They can thus browse faster and with fewer errors.
Absolutely. Site/page icons is a great feature. But automatically requesting favicon.ico unless there's a <link> to it in the document is NOT a good thing to do. It would almost be like automatically requesting favbackg.gif if no background picture is specified. One of the problems with this is that small sites hosted by services like Geocities will automatically get the favicon.ico of their free hosting provider. That can be very annoying. Another issue is that some sites has a limit on the amount of data that can be transferred each month. They want to keep their sites as small as possible, and even though this is just a small request for a small file, it can still be a problem for some people. Some people are even blocking Mozilla from their sites because of this! Mozilla's way of doing this spams servers much more than IE's, since Moz request favicon.ico for every visit (IE only does it when the page is bookmarked). It's only a few sites that block Mozilla for this, and IMO blocking Mozilla just because of this is to go way too far, but still, it does show that many webmasters are not happy about the way it is now. (Before anyone accuses me of lying or having a very bad memory, let me say that, yes, I myself have talked about blocking Mozilla. It was stupid of me, I know, but I was just so shocked when Mozilla suddenly copied one of IE's biggest misfeatures when we had the chance to implement it correctly that I simply couldn't think clearly. And my comment http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109843#c24 was just an empty threat anyway - I do produce websites, but I do not have anything to do with the physical servers, and I don't care whether they are spammed with bogus requests or not. It is probably the most stupid comment I have ever made in Bugzilla - I admit that.) So please, whoever is in charge here, would you please reconsider this decision? Site/page icons /is/ a very nice feature, but it is only eye candy! With all the disadvantages that comes with auto-fetching favicon.ico, wouldn't the best long-term solution be to disable the auto-fetching and instead evangelise sites to use <link rel="icon">? I think that that is what would be best for Mozilla, best for the sites, and best for the Web.[1] [1] I don't want anybody - that includes you, JTK - to reply to this with something like "yeah, but it's not best for AOL and they are the ones who really control this project". -- /Jonas `amazing! did I really write all that?� J�rgensen
