
Apple's new  not-quite-favicon syntax causing problems in other browsers - tbassetto
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2015Jun/0011.html
======
the_mitsuhiko
Before you get your pitchforks out: this is a better start for the discussion
than the apple-touch-icon mess from the past. They attempted to extend the
standard in an almost intended way, but it turns out that it was not really
ever considered well enough for this.

There is a discussion on the mail thread about how to deal with this issue
properly. This is for a preview version of Safari and this is not the final
specification.

------
rbanffy
Is it my flawed impression or this could be avoided rather neatly with a <link
rel="tabbed-icon" thing?

~~~
aaronharnly
This very cordial downthread reply by an Apple engineer addresses that idea
directly, and is open to it:

    
    
      From: Maciej Stachowiak <___@apple.com> 
      Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2015 12:00:59 -0700
    
      > On Jun 15, 2015, at 3:27 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl> wrote:
      > 
      > On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 12:18 PM, Kornel Lesiński <kornel@geekhood.net> wrote:
      >> The new Safari is still only a preview, so I hope Apple will switch to a better solution.
      > 
      > It would be great if we could get some feedback from Ted & colleagues
      > on what the thinking here was.
    

First: it looks like we neglected to send our proposal for this ahead of our
preview release. It’s now been sent belatedly. We regret the error.

Second: we’re definitely open to changing this if there’s consensus for a
different syntax.

Our original thinking on this: rel=icon is intended to support selection from
multiple formats and sizes. It seemed natural to extend this to the notion of
a monochrome icon that’s intended to be recolored. Before deploying the
feature, we thought it would be cleaner to extend rel=icon than to invent a
new rel value. (There’s already the legacy -apple-touch-icon value with in
theory could be obsoleted by rel=icon with the appropriate size). For similar
reasons, it seemed better to reuse the existing theme-color meta (which gives
license to darken or lighten the color as needed).

The nature of the problem: to avoid breaking the regular favicon, both in
Safari and in other browsers, sites need to make their regular favicon
explicit with a rel=icon link (instead of relying on favicon.ico), and need to
put the mask icon first instead of last in the list of icon links. We thought
clear advice to do this, plus the fact that breakage should be obvious, would
limit the scope of the error and would lead sites to fix it promptly. That
doesn’t seem to be happening, at least yet. We noticed this problem internally
even before shipping (working with some sites to get mask icons up before
release), but there was internal debate about whether the problem would shrink
or grow over time.

Where do we go from here: (1) We could add "mask" or something like it to the
standard, and change browsers to ignore mask icons in contexts where they are
looking for a regular icon.

(2) We could change to a new rel type for mask icons, such as rel=mask-icon,
but keep theme-color as the source of the color, with the possibility of
darkening light colors used to make light colors viable.

(3) We could change to a new rel type for mask icons, such as rel=mask-icon,
and give it a color attribute to be used specifically for the icon.

We don’t have a strong principle on this, and it’s not too late to change
before shipping the release version of Safari 9. We welcome input on which of
these would be best, or whether something else entirely is better.

Sorry again for not bringing this up before the preview release that included
this feature.

Regards, Maciej

[https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-
archive/2...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-
archive/2015Jun/0020.html)

~~~
userbinator
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel that style of writing rubs them the
wrong way...? It seems excessively verbose and vague.

I would've preferred something more direct and to-the-point, perhaps an "oops,
we didn't consider that it would conflict with existing browser behaviour;
we'll move to a different rel."

~~~
nicky0
Probably just you. I found it detailed and clear.

------
VeryVito
I wouldn't say it's a "new" syntax as much as it's an experimental syntax (at
least according to the Apple dev stating the reason for the choice in the pre-
release version and explaining that they're not committed to the new syntax
for the release version [[https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-
archive/2...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-
archive/2015Jun/0020.html\])). I'd be surprised if it makes it into Safari's
released version, and will hold my outrage until then.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Ohh. So that's why Twitter's tab icon turned black.

~~~
mahouse
On what device?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Firefox on Windows.

~~~
piyush_soni
It's showing fine for me (Firefox on Windows 7)

------
Armand_Grillet
The worst is that Safari needs a new type of favicon disrupting other web
browsers but still doesn't display standards favicons natively.

~~~
sigzero
I am not sure what you mean. Safari shows favicons of sites I visit?

~~~
cheshire137
In the bookmarks bar, no favicons show up. This is the major reason I can't
switch to Safari: most of my bookmarks bar items have no label in Chrome, I
just visually recognize their favicons and that's sufficient.

~~~
ljoshua
Precisely, I'm in the same boat. And while I've seen workarounds (like
[http://include.aorcsik.com/2014/12/04/add-favicons-to-
safari...](http://include.aorcsik.com/2014/12/04/add-favicons-to-
safari-8-tabs/)) I really don't want to have to add SIMBL extensions just to
get something every other browser already does. :(

If it is there for pinned sites, why not add it for all of them?

------
judemelancon
Everyone who read this has now given more thought to this issue than Safari's
developers seem to have.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Typical for apple I have spent days trying to sort out the NTP fiasco that
apple introduced in mavericks.

Networked macs lose connection to the OSx Server as clocks drift apart and
kerberos authentication fails

~~~
jessaustin
Why is NTP so hard for a proprietary OS? I have never had a problem on Linux,
while on Windows I can't remember seeing NTP ever actually work.

~~~
MichaelGG
Windows implements SNTP. The goal is to keep the clock within tolerance for
Kerberos (5 minutes). It's embarrassingly bad but they don't seem to have any
real reason to fix it. Also the w32tm code is ... bad.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
At least NTP works on windows I have been trying to migrate a small 15 mac
office to use networked users - because of the changes apple made to NTP all
the networked macs lose sync after a couple of hours and crash quite often
screwing up the outlook database.

It's certainly soured me on apple period I am recommending getting some nice
dell i7 hexcore work stations.

------
sschueller
Why are Twitter, Yelp, and Pinterest implementing this when it clearly causes
problems?

~~~
smackfu
So they could be demoed in the WWDC keynote.

~~~
JohnTHaller
And break it for existing actual users. Brilliant.

------
smackfu
Here's the proposal they meant to send out prior to the announcement, which
explains the rationale: [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-
archive/2...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-
archive/2015Jun/0017.html)

------
donatj
So why exactly can't Safari just use Favicon's for pinned tabs like everyone
else? Gotta love standards.

~~~
SG-
It does work with standard favicon, this is to extend it.

~~~
donatj
Embrace, extend, extinguish? I thought that was Microsoft...

------
brudgers
Golly gee, web development sure seems to be getting complicated. Do you think
there will ever be tools that can test web pages against a diversity of
browsers in order to catch this sort of problem before it hits production?

~~~
epmatsw
Is there any automated tool that would catch a visual-only issue with a
favicon that doesn't throw any errors or warnings?

~~~
brudgers
Maybe an Apple intern could sit in front of a computer that runs ImageMagick's
compare utility. However, it stands to reason that Apple would be left with a
choice between hiring two interns and not having an intern write their
production code. Or maybe Apple could have the intern work on automating a
visual testing process so that builds break when they break other browsers.

But I never said anything about "automating" since even manual testing would
be a QA improvement.

