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Safari 9: Favicons on pinned tabs
- Thread starter ianmichaelbrownie
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Hopefully not. They look like crap and aren't even that helpful. Safari looks much cleaner without them.
Not all pinned tabs use the favicon. I can't tell exactly what causes Safari to use it vs the letter on a colored background. It might hardcoded for some specific sites. Reddit, for example, uses an entirely different image that is not the favicon.
I completely disagree FWIW. I like being able to tell at a quick glance what a tab is without having to read its name.
MacRumors has an Apple touch icon, and it is displayed as a letter on pinned tabs.
Cleaner it may be, but also harder to sort through my many open tabs. I don't think I would mind the favicons.
My mistake, I was thinking about the other icons. The pinned icons are finally coming from the html5 link tag. And as mentioned above should be svg.
https://developer.apple.com/library....html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH9-SW20
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Firefox 41 and Chrome will be supporting svg-favicons, IE supports it if you make a svg named favicon.ico
. And it seem like the format for pinned-type in Safari will be changed to something like<link rel="mask-icon" href="pinned.svg" color="#00FFFF">
I am sure favicon.ico will still be supported as before, as well as the appletouchicons...
For pinned tabs, existing SVG favicons do not work. They will need to be redone.Firefox 41 and Chrome will be supporting svg-favicons, IE supports it if you make a svg named favicon.ico
<link rel="mask-icon" href="pinned.svg" color="#00FFFF">
I am sure favicon.ico will still be supported as before, as well as the appletouchicons...
Furthermore, Safari in 10.11 still doesn't seem to support an SVG as a regular favicon.
It doesn't seem to be the case now, going by the picture above and the missing icon of MacRumors. It's already annoying enough that many websites don't seem to support the large icons in the favourites view of Safari 8 either. I don't get why Apple always need to do their own thing. It's not like Safari is currently a popular browser.Firefox 41 and Chrome will be supporting svg-favicons, IE supports it if you make a svg named favicon.ico
<link rel="mask-icon" href="pinned.svg" color="#00FFFF">
I am sure favicon.ico will still be supported as before, as well as the appletouchicons...
I get the logic behind this. Apple touch icons have been around for a while (originally introduced as icons for sites on the iOS home screen), and regular favicons just aren't large enough to do the job without looking very ugly/pixelated.
Tell that to Apple, which now wants to charge $99/year just to develop extensions for it.
Of course, there is probably no alternative in that case. In general I support to move towards SVG, but that doesn't mean that it will be widely supported soon. Have they started supporting SVG for apple-touch-icon too? I said it to prove my point that adoption isn't quick. Same thing with Safari push notifications (not the HTML5 web notifications). I only know of a handful of big news outlets and mainly Apple blogs and fansites that support it. Apple doesn't have the dominance on the web, so it shouldn't pretend that it can do as it pleases like with iOS. For us users it means that we will have to deal with many missing or ugly icons until more websites support it. Many of my favourites can only be distinguished by colour.
They actually explained their rationale to the web development mailing list the day they announced El Cap and they do mostly makes sense. There are a lot of limitations to the way things are done now and Apple wants to push a new way for the future.
The reality is that in order to progress to better ways of doing things, browsers have to come up with new ideas and to push it hard. This happens all the time, browsers pre-fix CSS/HTML code that only works in their browsers, coming up with new ways to do Javascript and so on. If new ideas makes sense to do, other browsers will use it and it will then be standardized.
Favicons were developed a very long time ago, they were not meant to be used the way it is being used now. It's small, ugly and can't be scaled up. Apple wants to push forward with nicer looking icons by doing it differently. The good news is that Apple is doing it in a way that all browsers can benefit from. The main question, will that happen? We'll just have to wait and see.
If we all stick with the same technologies, there can be no further progress on the web. All browsers need to prototype ideas and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
I was under the impression that the current release of Firefox/Chrome supported it, but it appears you are correct.
However, Safari makes things worse by not showing the "alternate icon" png, so sites with an SVG as a normal favicon won't have one at all.
Exactly this. I understand that Apple wants to move things forward and push new techologies, but why not even add a fallback for normal favicons in this case?
Based on my experience with a few software companies, fallbacks usually remove the incentive to improve things. In other words, if Apple provides a fallback, there is zero incentive to even do the proper icon. Why do a SVG icon when the favicon is good enough.