Slashdot Mirror
Safari Should Display Favicons in Its Tabs (daringfireball.net)
Favicon -- or its lack thereof, to be precise -- has remained one of the longest running issues Safari users have complained about. For those of you who don't use Safari, just have a look at this mess I had earlier today when I was using Safari on a MacBook. There's no way I can just have a look at the tabs and make any sense of them. John Gruber, writing for DaringFireball: The gist of it is two-fold: (1) there are some people who strongly prefer to see favicons in tabs even when they don't have a ton of tabs open, simply because they prefer identifying tabs graphically rather than by the text of the page title; and (2) for people who do have a ton of tabs open, favicons are the only way to identify tabs. With many tabs open, there's really nothing subjective about it: Chrome's tabs are more usable because they show favicons. [...] Once Safari gets to a dozen or so tabs in a window, the left-most tabs are literally unidentifiable because they don't even show a single character of the tab title. They're just blank. I, as a decade-plus-long dedicated Safari user, am jealous of the usability and visual clarity of Chrome with a dozen or more tabs open. And I can see why dedicated Chrome users would consider Safari's tab design a non-starter to switching. I don't know what the argument is against showing favicons in Safari's tabs, but I can only presume that it's because some contingent within Apple thinks it would spoil the monochromatic aesthetic of Safari's toolbar area. [...] And it's highly debatable whether Safari's existing no-favicon tabs actually do look better. The feedback I've heard from Chrome users who won't even try Safari because it doesn't show favicons isn't just from developers -- it's from designers too. To me, the argument that Safari's tab bar should remain text-only is like arguing that MacOS should change its Command-Tab switcher and Dock from showing icons to showing only the names of applications. The Mac has been famous ever since 1984 for placing more visual significance on icons than on names. The Mac attracts visual thinkers and its design encourages visual thinking. So I think Safari's text-only tab bar isn't just wrong in general, it's particularly wrong on the Mac.
Can we please not say this too loudly, otherwise Mozilla will realize there's an aspect of Chrome they're not copying, and copy it.
Firefox has a minimum size for all tabs. If there are too many tabs open, it'll just change the tab bar so it scrolls. This works perfectly. Combined with using Favicons, it means it's very easy to find open tabs.
Chrome... doesn't. I've seen it get to the point that it doesn't even have room to show the Favicons yet.
Both Apple and Google need to look at Firefox here. Tabs are not perfect, but Firefox is doing it the right way.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
favicon.ico, retrieved by default by Internet Explorer and now most major browsers (short for Favorites Icon) and before tabs was used to put an icon on favorites shortcuts and desktop web shortcuts. Go ahead and use Internet Explorer to retrieve http://domain.com/ and shortly thereafter, check your web server logs to see a request to http://domain.com/favicon.ico - this behavior seems to be default in most browsers now. It also serves as the sole identifier on tabs on browsers with too many tabs open to show title text, which is the point of the story post.
Since the early days, support has been added to HTML to set its location/format manually with <link rel="shortcut icon" href="">.
Apple decided to completely forego the existing HTML, and then defines <link rel="apple-touch-icon"> to define the image that appears when you make a web page a shortcut on your phone/tablet home screen.
You realise you're full of shit, right? Walk into pretty much any major tech company and you'll find huge numbers of people using Apple's laptops, because they're pretty awesome development machines.
yet he CONTINUES to use said piece of shit proprietary browser all this time? Really? If you're not happy with the product, STOP using it.
Some people are interested in software beyond a single infuriating feature and would like to see it fixed rather than using an alternative that has far more infuriating features.
If I stopped doing something everytime I found one thing I didn't like I'd be living on a farm somewhere without electricity.