Favicons can be TIFF? Browsers don't have support for TIFF—for one, libtiff has historically been a huge source of security vulnerabilities. What pages have TIFF favicons?
The complexity of downloading favicons
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Re: The complexity of downloading favicons
#32favicons? Try scraping the page title of a random link
The consistent problem for me is that cloudflare doesnt like (some/certain/it seems random) ip ranges or user agents and pops up a captcha immediately
Re: The complexity of downloading favicons
#33Favicons can be TIFF? Browsers don't have support for TIFF—for one, libtiff has historically been a huge source of security vulnerabilities. What pages have TIFF favicons?
I had a list of 500 domains that I used for testing when originally developing. To be clear I don't recall seeing tiff files loaded in browsers, but I definitely remember seeing them downloaded and crashing my code.
I wrote favicon-getter just as a means to populate an icon next to a list of links in another project. Hence, all the references to Yak-shaving.
In the end I just assumed that I would "almost" never see a tiff used as favicon and move on.
Re: The complexity of downloading favicons
#3417: sometimes there are multiple sizes, according to the spec ( https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#rel-icon ) 18: sometimes favicons are not square 19: sometimes favicons have transparent pixels (GIF) or an alpha channel (PNG)
Good ones! I forgot about the transparent pixels. May I add those with credit to you?
ICO files can have an alpha channel or a bit mask.
Re: The complexity of downloading favicons
#35favicons? Try scraping the page title of a random link The consistent problem for me is that cloudflare doesnt like (some/certain/it seems random) ip ranges or user agents and pops up a captcha immediately
Have you tried proxy-rotation services like Crawlera? This is on my radar if I encounter too many issues.
Re: The complexity of downloading favicons
#36Chromium favicon service for comparison: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/master/components/...
BTW they recently added SVG support.
Re: The complexity of downloading favicons
#37Another recent complication is serving different favicons for browsers running a dark mode. For example, somehow nytimes.com inverts theirs on my browser and it actually looks great. Sites need to be aware that a dark icon over a transparent background will be invisible in dark mode.
It's actually relatively easy using a media-query in CSS: https://css-tricks.com/dark-mode-favicons/
Re: The complexity of downloading favicons
#38I wrote https://github.com/scottwernervt/favicon in Python to get a company's logo. Looks like I need to handle more edge cases.
Re: The complexity of downloading favicons
#39Another recent complication is serving different favicons for browsers running a dark mode. For example, somehow nytimes.com inverts theirs on my browser and it actually looks great. Sites need to be aware that a dark icon over a transparent background will be invisible in dark mode.
This is an annoying downside of dark mode, which I tend to have enabled on everything all the time: Favicons often don't look good (github, circleci...). Also many slack emoji don't show up. I don't know if there's a good solution to this. It's unfeasible to require developers to provide two icons, particularly in places that are mothballed. Should browsers always render favicons against a light/white background?
It's not really a problem of dark vs. light, it's the fact that transparency in a generic logo is a pretty bad idea. I'm not sure what transparency is supposed to solve that an explicitly designed color wouldn't.