twoeyes.org explains why favicons are important and how you can add one to your site. I highly recommend this and agree with twoeyes.org that it's important to making your site usable in tabbed browsers.
Posted by asa at August 24, 2003 11:54 AMI agree... we use favicons everywhere within NewsMonster. Within the sidebar, on pages, for relevancy metric display, etc.
Also you should point out that the Mozilla Bookmark Manager also allows the user to store favicons next to bookmark links.
Cool stuff. It can make that extra 10% difference in usability in my mind.
Posted by: Kevin Burton on August 25, 2003 01:25 AMI completely disagree.
The issues with tab usability aren't going to be solved by having a particular picture assigned to each tab (imagine having 40 tabs open, each with a different icon - I can't imagine this really being more usable, with every icon lost in the sea of every other icon, than what we currently have) but with improvements to the tab UI itself. For example, I've long since used the following userChrome.css entry to increase the minimum width of the tabs shown in my installation:
tab
{
min-width: 10em !important;
}
Now they "overflow" sooner, and I get fewer tabs shown at once, but, at the same time, I can actually read the titles and I have no problem knowing what's in each tab.
If proper overflow handling would be implemented (bug 155325, then it would be that much easier to know what tabs are open.
In my personal opinion, favicons are nothing more than "cool eyecandy" that only serve to distract from the real UI issues. While they might do their job when there are only a few tabs in use, they quickly lose their effectiveness as you add more tabs.
Additionally, I don't like the server side of things and object to my own server getting needless hits (traffic) from every browser that has favicons enabled. For that reason, I've added a 0-byte favicon.ico file to my site.
Posted by: Jason Bassford on August 25, 2003 06:40 AMI think the reason that favicons are a good thing is that you can identify something by a picture faster than you can identify it by reading the text. Particularly for folks with vision disabilities. Overall tab usability is a different issue.
Personally I don't like to see the favicon used everywhere in the chrome. A favicon in the URLbar, a row of favicons in the bookmarks bar, and a row of favicons in the tab bar is a lot of visual clutter. Especially when favicons are all different shapes and colors, and in some cases animated.
Posted by: on August 25, 2003 10:46 AMIf you like having everything on one row, favicons are *hugely* size-saving.
Example: http://members.rogers.com/plarse5009/favicon.png
There are no navi. buttons because I use AIO gestures.
Oh and tab overflowing would be *wonderful!! Some of the ideas in that bug were really good...I like the chevron at the end and grouping by server.
Posted by: on August 25, 2003 03:33 PMI love favicons and everyone else does as well. So why are they in Firebird stored in the dumpster called the cache? I'd love to see them stored in a place where they don't disappear all the time...
Posted by: T Petersen on August 26, 2003 09:45 AMI find favicons useful, but browsers should only look for them if the HTML page says to do so. I intensely dislike the number of hits I get to fetch the non-existant icon for my site.
Tab overflowing's something which should have been done ages ago. Before now I just assumed no one else cared about overflows enough to bother fixing it. :)
Posted by: Andrew Sidwell on August 26, 2003 11:34 AMToo bad Firebird has a bug which assigns wrong favicons to bookmarks... So why should I use them again? Not that I don't...
Posted by: Tom Sommer on August 26, 2003 01:02 PMI can't get Mozilla 1.4.1 to show a website's favicon even though I have it selected to do so in the Preferences of the browser. Can anyone help me?
I'm running Windows 98 2nd ed.
