Fetch favicons only when needed |
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Issue descriptionClank tries to fetch /favicon.ico for every main frame page that it visits. On Android, favicons are almost never shown to users. In addition, many favicon requests result in a 404 error, which often serve up fairly large error pages. Given that favicons are not shown in the UI, I think we should stop Clank from fetching them at all. At least we should consider doing so for Data Saver users. As far as I can tell, favicons are only used in two places in Clank: - If the user chooses "add to home screen" - If the site ends up being in the top 8 most visited pages on the NTP In both cases, I think we can special case the favicon fetch if needed, but avoid fetching the favicon by default. A few years ago, we added an optimization to Flywheel (the Data Saver proxy) to drop the response body from favicon requests that resulted in a 404 response code. This resulted in substantial data savings for users. Still, Flywheel handles around 250M favicon requests in a day, using a total of around 400GB of data in all. I think we should not fetch favicons by default and only do so when explicitly needed in the UI.
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Feb 6 2017
Ariel -- given that this relates to data use, do you mind looking into this? Thanks.
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Mar 17 2017
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Mar 17 2017
> As far as I can tell, favicons are only used in two places in Clank: > - If the user chooses "add to home screen" > - If the site ends up being in the top 8 most visited pages on the NTP I don't think this is true? 1. Open m.reddit.com in Clank 2. Click on the [1] in the upper-right corner to see the list of all open tabs 3. Note that the reddit alien favicon appears in the upper-left corner of the title bar for the reddit tab
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Mar 20 2017
There is a third pace where favicons are used on Android: The tab switcher
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Mar 20 2017
Ben -- are you working with the favicon folks to figure out what we should be doing here? I'm going to reassign this bug to you -- feel free to dupe it or reassign as needed. Thanks.
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Mar 20 2017
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Mar 20 2017
Yeah, the bug I listed in comment #3 requests metrics we discussed out of band. I'll hold ownership at least until we finalize the plan for that bug.
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Mar 21 2017
There are at least two more UIs where favicons are shown on mobile: - Bookmarks. - History. As a longer shot, it has also been discussed whether omnibox suggestions should display favicons as well, possibly in the future with Chrome Home.
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Mar 21 2017
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Mar 23 2017
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Apr 2 2018
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Apr 2 2018
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Apr 2 2018
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Sep 21
Marking as WontFix since it is impossible to predict when the favicon is going to be used. e.g., user may go to history or in tab overview. |
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Comment 1 by mdw@chromium.org
, Jan 17 2017