Hey Folks,
Let’s get back to this subject as it seems there is still no solution. Recently 
we - Yandex.Browser - discussed with Opera if there could be a standard for 
page icons (let’s call it so) on NewTabPage that replace small screenshots with 
nice logos like this:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1830800/ss_tablo.jpg

This page icon might also contain a notification counter that would enable 
website to communicate with user and improve retention. Similar to mobile icons 
and notifications. But on desktop there might be more than one counter.

* Counter use-cases:
1.Mail (gmail, yahoo, yandex) - number of unread/new emails.
2.Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) - number of notifications, 
messages, friends requests.
3.E-commerce (Amazon, eBay, TaoBao etc) - number of cart items (waiting list 
items)
4.Microblogs and contend-based platforms (tumblr, youtube, ask, quora, news 
website etc) - number of new content.

* How the standard could look like:
<link rel=“newtabpage_icon" href=“logo_url" show_title=“true/false” (optional 
attribute; default: false - for main page; true - for internal) 
ntp_manifest=“manifest_url” (optional attribute; only for counter 
implementation) />

* How the manifest could look like:
I would suggest to postpone this discussion for later and focus on the first 
part. Step by step.

* What kind of issues do I see:
1) There’re 3 general formats of page icons: 
    a) square in Chrome, Opera
    b) floating in FF and Safari
    c) fixed ratio in Yandex (1:2), Maxthon (1:1,4)
Obvious there should just one icon provided by webmaster. So we need to agree 
on the aspect ratio (and size). Thus some developers will need to find a way 
how to handle it. But I believe it’s just a matter of fitting and resizing.
2) There is already a couple of standards or quasi-standads:
    - favicons (most promising seems to be the increasing of their size and svg 
support) 
    - apple-touch-icon used by Apple and Android
    - msapplication-TileImage used by MS
    - Firefox OS icon (detached case)
    - SpeedDial API by Opera (as an extension)

In Yandex.Browser we think how to improve our Tablo API and we would prefer to 
use some common approach rather than developing a proprietary standard. So 
guys, what do you think? Is there a place for such kind of standard or it’s 
already too tight among those semi-standards?

Mike Tomshinsky
Yandex.Browser
tomshin...@yandex-team.ru

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