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We analyzed 425k favicons

iconmap.io

101–110 of 131 posts

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#101

It such a shame that Safari does not support SVG favicons. It's the only major browser which doesn't: https://caniuse.com/link-icon-svg All current browsers support PNG.

Its such a shame that PNG does not support packing multiple dimensions into one file like .ico formats actually do.

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#102
post #2

Also see the gigantic map - https://iconmap.io The blog post is the analysis of the data set, the map is the visualization.

Is the dataset available for download? I couldn't immediately find a download to the dataset in the linked article. My hands itch to do some dimension reduction on that data and make some nice plots

damn I was thinking about that too :-)

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#103
> We did a hacky image analysis with ImageMagick to survey favicon colors. Here is the dominant color breakdown across our favicons. This isn’t very accurate, unfortunately. I suspect that many multicolored favicons are getting lumped in with purple.

Writing or reviewing a sentence like this should make you reconsider. Either do the right analysis or remove this from your article. But when you say your analysis is probably wrong and the results look weird, then why publish as is?

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#104

Also, we turned up 2,000 domains that redirect to a very shady site called happyfamilymedstore[dot]com. Stuff like avanafill[dot]com, pfzviagra[dot]com, prednisoloneotc[dot]com. These domains made it into the Tranco 100k somehow. Full list here - https://gist.github.com/gurgeous/bcb3e851087763efe4b2f4b992f...

IMHO, you should add this note in the blog too. Also, wondering about the use case of the website... are you building anything else too?

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#105
post #101

It such a shame that Safari does not support SVG favicons. It's the only major browser which doesn't: https://caniuse.com/link-icon-svg All current browsers support PNG.

Its such a shame that PNG does not support packing multiple dimensions into one file like .ico formats actually do.

It can be done with MNG. There just has never been a tooling ecosystem that supports it for non-animated applications.

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#106
post #63

I worked on Opera Link, the first built-in synchronization between different installations of the Opera browser, both desktop, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile (+ a web view). Favicons got included in the data from day one, and it was awesome to get the look and feel of your bookmark bar/UI with the correct icons right away. Back then we stored the booksmarks in a home grown XML data store (built on top of mysql, acting m…

Wait, so you can see user's data directly?

The truth is that most services will have a set of devops with access to personal information. And some times, we need to look at private data to solve issues like this. My first instinct back then was that some smart hacker had created a FUSE support for Link or something similar.

Opera Link did not encrypt bookmarks and speeddials etc, but had datatypes encrypted with master password, even while syncing. We where two people with the access and knowledge to access individual user information, and we took it very serious.

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#107
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so you can see user's data directly?

GP is talking about something implemented in 2008. It was a different time and a different mentality.

Google Chrome Sync help docs imply it defaults to storing data on servers unencrypted by default.[1]

Firefox Sync seems to have sane/encrypted defaults.[2]

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139

[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#108
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, at least for me. If you checked in devtools, that's gzip over the wire size. Hover over the size and it'll show you the actual resource size, still 285k for me.

I committed a fix, it's now 24k uncompressed! :)

Congratulations. Don't forget your 11x improvement when it comes to the end of year reviews.

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#109
post #5
post #2

Also see the gigantic map - https://iconmap.io The blog post is the analysis of the data set, the map is the visualization.

I wonder if there might be a way to map all these using t-SNE to discrete grid locations? Maybe even an autoencoder. I'd love to see what features it could pick out. I don't see their data set though. hmmm. maybe I'll just have to crawl it on my own if I want to do it.

You can use t-SNE (or even better: UMAP or one of its variation) to create a 2D points cloud, and then use something like RasterFairy [1] to map 2D positions to the cells a grid. It usually works well.

[1] https://github.com/Quasimondo/RasterFairy

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#110
One weird behavior with favicons that I noticed is that Firefox will download both the 16x16 icon that matches the size its displayed at (on 1x pixel ratio screen) as well as the largest icon and then will display whichever finished last. This behavior makes no sense to me.
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