Faviconographer – Favicons for Your Safari Tabs | Hacker News Reader

Faviconographer – Favicons for Your Safari Tabs

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57 pointsattheodo16 comments

If developers are doing all this work just to get a feature back, I wish some people at Apple will wonder why it's not directly included.

I've contacted Safari devs and even created a bug report (marked as a duplicate a few days later) about that issue. The lack of an option to display favicons in Safari is incomprehensible, this small feature makes me unable to consider this browser as something else than the one I use to watch Apple keynotes.

I get that you like favicons, but how is the lack of this one very minor feature something you consider a complete roadblock to using the browser as a whole?

> I get that you like favicons, but how is the lack of this one very minor feature something you consider a complete roadblock to using the browser as a whole?

For those of us with lots of tabs (e.g. more than a dozen), favicons are the only way to know what is in each tab. With only a letter or two showing, favicons are the only tab content identifier that exists.

This goes double for Safari, which filters out any text in tab names that is shared between two or more tabs.

I normally group my windows by subject instead of having a bunch of completely unrelated tabs in a single window. You can also use Show All Tabs (⌘⇧\) to see all of the tabs in a window in a manner that shows you what each tab is (and also groups some tabs together, I think based on site, but I don't use it often enough to figure out the exact rules of when it groups tabs).

A window for "things opened from hacker news" can quickly get to well over a dozen tabs. :)

I do a similar thing for Chrome. It's not so much the missing minor feature, as much as the way the dev/mgmt team works. If Safari refuses to have favicons, then they might think another important thing for you is not important for them. For me, I refuse to use Chrome because they don't want to put an option or allow extensions to remove the X button on the tabs. It's silly, I know. But I want it because I press it accidentally every now and then. I might be missing out on other features etc they have, but I want this small think that they don't want to have. It's about the principal. For me, and for many others, each with their own requirements.

There are a lot of reasons to choose Safari over Firefox, which I use most of the time. The visualization for swiping backwards is a little better, syncing tabs or handoff to an iPad or iPhone seems a little smoother than the Firefox version, the rendering may be a little faster, and I like the show all tabs button a lot.

However, my favorites/bookmarks bar is a row of favicons. I feel like The first Macs and Apple IIc did a great job labeling hardware ports with good icons. You could quickly understand what they meant, and worked better than words for the labels. I don't understand why Apple has decided that favicons are such an abomination that using them for tiny buttons in the favorites bar isn't even an option hidden somewhere in a plist.

Really, I just miss having favicons enough, that the advantages of Safari aren't enough to get me using it instead of Firefox.

One person (or a small group of people) wanting something very, very badly does not necessarily mean it's the right thing to do for the product. It's an interesting data point, but far from definitive and taking it as such would be terrible product management. We have no way to know whether they "wonder why it's not directly included" or have considered doing it and decided not to.

It's pretty common that some software removes a feature, an extension or alternative is created to mimic the feature, and then over time the extension dies. I chalk it up to human attachment to workflows.

Usually, when some Apple UI component baffles me, I find it's because they and I assumed different things about how the work should be done--so the friction disappears when I step back and figure out what the devs were thinking.

In this case, I think they believe the task of reviewing all open pages, and of finding a specific page that is neither nearby nor recent, are unsuited to the tab bar and better done with the Show All Tabs screen.

I suggest you force yourself to rely on Show All Tabs for a week, then reevaluate.

I might be in the minority, but I really enjoy the fact there are no favicons in Safari, the cleaner looks really help the content of the current page stand out more.

And after all, there is Chrome, Firefox, and many others that do have them for the ones that find them useful.

I'd probably be just as vocal as the pro-favicon people if they brought them back. I'm not a tab hoarder though.

If they bring them back, it should be an app preference.

Cool. One bug I found: if you click on a link and it opens in a new tab, it will use the favicon from the previous tab even if the new tab has a different favicon.

Someone posted a less intrusive extension hack (which also doesn't use real favicons) a while back:

https://github.com/logandaniels/emoji-tab-icons

This is really neat! However, since there's a slight delay whenever moving the safari window, would you consider having they only show up while a key is being held? Like option or command?

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