Haven't managed to get my headshot down to less than 10k without looking horrible no matter how much I tweaked the JPEG or WebP settings, and thought that was just a tad too big to embed. Maybe I need to find a different picture that compresses better.
I got that 280k Discord favicon down to just 24K simply by opening it in GIMP and saving it again. I got it down to 12K by indexing it to 255 colours rather than using RGB (I can't tell the difference even at full size). You can probably make it even smaller if you tried, but that's diminishing returns. Still, I bet with 5 more minutes you can get it to ~5k or so.
It's very easy; you just need to care. Does it matter? Well, when I used Slack I regularly spent a minute waiting for them to push their >10M updates, so I'd say that 250k here and 250k there etc. adds up and matters, giving real actual improvements to your customers.
The Event Horizon Telescope having a huge favicon I can understand; probably just some astronomer who uploaded it in WordPress or something. Arguably a fault of the software for not dealing with that more sensibly, but these sort of oversights happen. A tech company making custom software for a living is quite frankly just embarrassing to the entire industry. It's a big fat "fuck you" to anyone from less developed areas with less-than-ideal internet connections.
You made me laugh out loud.
I agree that stuff like YouTube.com saying 144x but really 145x seems like it should be embarrassing.
When adding a website/webapp to these earlier home screens, the OS would apply a gloss effect over the icon in order to match the aesthetic of the standard apps. The precomposed icon was a way for the developer to stop the OS from applying this effect, such as if their logo already had a different gloss effect already applied (i.e “precomposed”) or other design where adding the glossy shine wouldn’t look right. The standard icon allowed the OS to apply the gloss effect - which was a timesaver as Apple did tweak the gloss contour over the years: hence using a standard icon ensured that the website/webapp always matched the user’s OS version.
Full list here - https://gist.github.com/gurgeous/bcb3e851087763efe4b2f4b992f...
After they get into these random wordpress sites, then then embed links back to their sketchy site in obscure places on the wordpress site that they hacked, so that owners of the site don't notice, but search bots do. They usually leave the wordpress site alone, but will create a user account to get back into it again later if Wordpress patches an exploit. All of this exploit and link adding is automated, so it is just done by crawlers and bots.
This is done tens of thousands or even millions of times over. All of these sketchy backlinks eventually add up, even if they are low quality, and provide higher ranking for the site they all point to.
Think of websites like mommy blogs, diet diaries, family sites, personal blogs, and random service companies (plumbers, pest control, restaurants, etc) that had their nephew throw up a wordpress site instead of hiring a professional.
I don't mean to pick on wordpress, but it really is the most common culprit of these attacks. Because so many Wordpress sites exist that are operated by people who aren't informed about basic security. Plus, wordpress is open source, so exploits get discovered by looking at source code and attackers will sell those exploits instead of reporting them. So Wordpress is in an infinite cycle of chasing exploits and patching them.
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 more or less as a key-value store). This worked quite nice, and it allowed us to easily scale the system.
One night the databases and backends handling the client requests suddenly started eating a lot more memory, and the database started using much more storage than normal.
As one of only two backend devops working on Opera Link, I had to debug this, and find out what was going on. After a while I isolated the problem to a handful of users. But how could a few users affect the system so much?
As a part of the XML data store, we decided naively to store the favicons in the XML, as a base64 encoded string. While not pretty, a 16x16 PNG is not that much data, and even with thousand of bookmarks, the total overhead on compression and parsing was neglishable. What we did not foresee was what I uncovered that night; A semi-popular porn site had changed something on their server. They had started serving the images while also pointing browser to the same images as the favicon! Each image being multiple megabytes, sent from the client, parsed on the backend, decoded, verified, encoded back to base64, added to the XML DOM, serialized, compressed and pushed back to the database...
Before going to bed that night, I had implemented a backlist of domains we would not accept favicons for, cleaned up the "affected" user data, and washed my eyes with soap.
I miss those days!
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.
I don't agree. That's the kind of coddling that encourages incompetence. Instead of compensating for others' mistakes, just let their stuff break.
I wonder if Safai on iOS ignores the hints. When I tested, I was surprised to see that pressing the share icon, which holds the option for `Add to Home Screen`, would cause a download of all of the icons listed with `link rel="icon"`.
Favicons are a huge pain to deal with correctly.
What's the point of failing and breaking stuff if someone tells you their image is 144x144 but it's really 145x145? Who does that benefit?
In this particular case, it seems to me that the hints serve no purpose and should be abolished, and in the meantime fully ignored, altogether. All necessary metadata is contained in the image file, and browsers should also be (relatively) strict in what image files with what metadata they accept, for security reasons alone.
And if they also went so far as limiting file size, the perpetrators that clog up bandwidth by putting up multi-MB favicons would catch on much earlier (or at all), too.
So what actually is the point of those hints, if browsers have to fallback anyway?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle (Quite short)
The browsers job is to do the best it can, that's what users want. No one would use a browser that breaks at the smallest tiniest error in the source code.
except for the short-lived XHTML fad which tbh I kind of miss every day
All current browsers support PNG.
Sure, there is some nuance in that you wouldn't want some fine detail to get lost at the displayed size, but presumably you know you're making a favicon when you do so.
Or, you're the NFL & you're going to supply a 4 megapixel image IDK.
The blog post is the analysis of the data set, the map is the visualization.
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.
My hands itch to do some dimension reduction on that data and make some nice plots
Other than that, I'm still pretty meh about them.
We also did something looks at favicons by IP:
Same for Ruby, the syntax is perfectly suited for transforming, digging through and acting upon data. I didn't even add a Gemfile, only used standard library functions, transforming the data the Go program mined into usable information serialized in JSON which was subsequently used as a static database for a webpage.
You can find the source here: https://github.com/tinco/stellar-core-go, the Go is in cmd and the Ruby is in tools.
The site it powers is now defunct, apparently they changed some stuff in the past 3 years and the crawler no longer functions.
What does broken mean in this context? Non-PNG, or actually broken? I assume the author has the files.
Sadly it doesn't quite work for me any more, but the youtube video does a decent job showing what it looked like when it worked.
> I recommend that browsers ignore these hints because they are wrong much of the time. We calculated a 6.7% error rate for these attributes, where the size is not found in the image or the type does not match the file format.
I think of much in this context to mean at least more than 50% of the time. So I had to look up the definition of the word. One definition from Merriam is "more than is expected or acceptable : more than enough." So I guess the usage is acceptable!
I always enjoy finding I have a slightly wrong definition in my mind for a word. Many arguments, or much arguments, fail to move forward due to the differing, unidentified, underlying assumptions relying on words with slightly different definitions, both people having a slightly different question they are arguing in their mind.
example image: https://smalldata.dev/images/mosaic.jpeg
script to get the favicons: https://gist.github.com/philshem/e59388197fd9ddb7dcdb8098f9f...
I know they additionally missed the directory specific favicons which have always had iffy support (i.e. /index.html => /favicon.ico and /munks-page/index.html => /munks-page/favicon.ico)
I suspect an animation. Anybody know how to find out?
It's interesting to ponder how many hundreds of bytes are exchanged between the browser and the site just for a simple GET request for the image.
As every other location I randomly scroll to has no recognizable image on it ... that seems preselected :-)
It was not; NFTs are digital certificates saying that you own certain digital content on the other hand The Million Dollar Homepage was basically selling ad space on the website.
You can argue you could buy part of the website(digital space) and therefore you own the part of the website but in reality you were renting it as an ad space meant to promote your website(link).
Purpose and vision of The Million Dollar Homepage and NFTs are completely different but I can see similarities between quasi owning digital space(part of website) and owning digital content or digital certificate(digital token).
And I checked a few of the sites, I just got lorem-ipsum style landing pages. I wonder what's the point, or are the scammers using the domains mostly for emails?
Just saying yes maybe it's easy to come up with a top 1000 list of sites on the net, but other than that no one really knows unless you're like Google/Bing/Apple/Cloudflare that have redirection urls/DNS control, tracking clicks etc
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?
