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SVG favicons have some cool benefits

austingil.com

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Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#51
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your favicon.ico can be compressed further to a 171 byte PNG. I confess I find this 271-byte incantation compelling despite increasing each response by that much, since it’ll load faster in the first place and avoid the overhead of another request:

There won't be any overhead once the file is cached. Your method requires the favicon to keep getting downloaded on every page load.

Both Chrome and Firefox (maybe others) have a separate cache for favicons that acts differently than the regular browser cache. I don't know if it caches data uris but it does cache more aggressively. I know some places like Stackoverflow add a cache-busting parameter to favicon.ico to get past it.

Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#52
>You could argue against using an inline SVG favicon because linking to a file can be cached, and adding the inline SVG on every page would increase the HTML size, but I don’t think it would make much difference, and I prefer the maintainability here.

>If you only have one website to deal with, this may not be a big deal, but as someone that maintains several sites and uses the same favicon, this is great.

Isn't it easiery to maintain if you just have to change one file instead of all sites?

Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#53
post #44

re: cacheability of favicons, this is basically a non-issue as the bandwidth-delay product of even a 10mbit/50ms connection is already 62 kB. Anything below this size on such a connection is likely to render faster than a separate request round-trip. This raises to almost 1.2 MB with a 100mbit/100ms connection.

Early on in a connection, congestion window is much more limiting than bandwidth delay product. Do you really want to spend that limited bandwidth on your favicon that you might have already sent to the user before, maybe even in the same browsing session? It's way better to put it as a separate image, maybe their browser will delay loading it because they're mostly useless. But, you can actually make a favicon usefu…

Good argument - unless the href length approaches the size of the resource itself!

I don't understand what you're saying about the utility of the favicon with HSTS. It's not something I'm expert in, so perhaps I'm missing something? What does "push browsers to load them" mean?

Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#54

There's a few things to be aware of with svg favicons. 1. If a favicon is missing or in a format that's not compatible with the browser. The browser will look for a /favicon.ico file at the root of the site. It's worth having that as a backup or you end up with no favicon and 404 errors in the console. 2. Google now shows a favicon in some search results. I'm pretty sure it works fine with SVG. But, if you use an emo…

2: Why? Are there even any systems left on the planet that aren't past EOL but don't have emoji fonts preinstalled at the OS level?

EOL doesn't matter - in use and in standard matters. Also the look depends on local conditions – the font. That's not what designers are keen on.

Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#55
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The webdev community needs to figure out a way to give Safari the IE6 treatment, and shame Apple enough to stop holding back progress. Apple gets coddled so much everyone seems shocked when you try to tell them how awful Safari is. Basically the only thing I really want out of all the anti-trust heading there way, is to force them to allow alternative renderers.

While Firefox has had non-broken support for SVG favicons since 2015, Chrome only added support last year. There are certainly features Safari is behind on but this isn't exactly a shining example of it. IE6 was borderline abandonware with hideously broken implementations of many core features. Implying that Safari is comparable to IE6 is just factually wrong. No, it doesn't live on the bleeding edge like Firefox and…

This sounds really pandering.

Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#56

There's a few things to be aware of with svg favicons. 1. If a favicon is missing or in a format that's not compatible with the browser. The browser will look for a /favicon.ico file at the root of the site. It's worth having that as a backup or you end up with no favicon and 404 errors in the console. 2. Google now shows a favicon in some search results. I'm pretty sure it works fine with SVG. But, if you use an emo…

I hope SVGs as favicons gets supported by all browsers soon. Until then (shameless plug) a colleague of mine wrote a guide what is really needed in terms of favicons: https://loqbooq.app/blog/add-favicon-modern-browser-guide

Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#58
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The webdev community needs to figure out a way to give Safari the IE6 treatment, and shame Apple enough to stop holding back progress. Apple gets coddled so much everyone seems shocked when you try to tell them how awful Safari is. Basically the only thing I really want out of all the anti-trust heading there way, is to force them to allow alternative renderers.

While Firefox has had non-broken support for SVG favicons since 2015, Chrome only added support last year. There are certainly features Safari is behind on but this isn't exactly a shining example of it. IE6 was borderline abandonware with hideously broken implementations of many core features. Implying that Safari is comparable to IE6 is just factually wrong. No, it doesn't live on the bleeding edge like Firefox and…

And where there are notable gaps in feature support (e.g. webp images) there are clean, formal mechanisms for fallback.

Facts; in addition Apple added support for WebP in Safari 14: https://webkit.org/blog/11340/new-webkit-features-in-safari-...

Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#59
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it is possible to have an ML filter that can downsample in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, even if things are not aligned at pixel-boundaries.

What you’re describing sounds like automated hinting. It’s a nice idea, but in practice it’s going to mess up too much stuff to be worth it, even if performance weren’t a problem.

I'm not so sure. Have you seen what the (loosely speaking) "inverse" operation (ML based superresolution) is capable of? E.g.:

https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2019/12/17/all-about-the-new...

Re: SVG favicons have some cool benefits

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Firefox has had non-broken support for SVG favicons since 2015, Chrome only added support last year. There are certainly features Safari is behind on but this isn't exactly a shining example of it. IE6 was borderline abandonware with hideously broken implementations of many core features. Implying that Safari is comparable to IE6 is just factually wrong. No, it doesn't live on the bleeding edge like Firefox and…

And where there are notable gaps in feature support (e.g. webp images) there are clean, formal mechanisms for fallback. Facts; in addition Apple added support for WebP in Safari 14: https://webkit.org/blog/11340/new-webkit-features-in-safari-...

Webp is a format that Google pulled out of their ass and successfully pushed because of their market dominance; I don't see why Apple should help Google's hegemony.
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