Defender of the Favicon (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Defender of the Favicon (2008)

p01.org

73 pointspplonski8624 comments

Somewhat off-topic: Can you still serve up 30GB favicons? Some friends and I used to prank each other with large favicon files. It just so happened that mobile browsers would keep downloading massive favicon files in the background even if you left the page. The unintended effect was a rather large mobile roaming bill for data-overage for one of our friends, which we paid.

Why stop at 30GB? IIRC with gif encoding you can just keep sending frames forever, something like https://github.com/jbochi/gifstreaming

Certainly! :-) I was using a simple nginx+haproxy server and static files for simplicity. I am maybe a bit lazy.

I couldn't figure out how to play this, so I tried making Snake in the favicon: https://defseg.io/snavicon

The framerate isn't great - is drawing to the favicon inherently slow, or can it be improved? - but it's at least somewhat playable.

Over ten years old, works fine in Firefox

Doesn’t work on iOS! Literally unplayable.

Jokes aside this is pretty neat. I feel like the concept of the favicon should be re-evaluated to consider the common use cases of today.

You are right on your second point. I think that there needs to be a 'favimage' that works for everything including the original use case plus those personal web app icons, start menu tiles, Google search results, twitter cards, Facebook open graph images and other social media applications. If this new format was responsive SVG with image embeds then it should work fine on the many different canvas sizes.

SVG is not very well suited for favicons. At that size, you often want to hand-tune the single pixels.

Shouldn't media queries along with shape-rendering be able to do that?

The format Haiku uses for its icons might be apt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_Vector_Icon_Format

Yep, it has LOD calculation features, so you can hide and show certain elements at smaller sizes so it always scales well.

Google Search results would make it easier for scammers.

I think it's cool. Useless, but cool :)

Works on Firefox

Not for me on 65.0.1 sadly. Plus my disk starts spinning like crazy when I open it for some reason.

Works great for me on 65.0.1.

Very nice. It works quite well, despite the small size of favicon or maybe I just need new glasses.

Unplayable. Left and Right do not move as expected.

for me, left and right seem oddly reversed. I don't know what would make that happen! Or maybe I just don't understand the game.

You need to look at the ground. Right moves your ship to the right, but also shifts the camera to the right, so you can see where you're going. That results in the ship actually moving to the left side of the frame.

There are people who haven't played Defender?

Damn, I'm old.

I might be older than you, just wasn't much of a gamer!

Aha! Looking at the ground is difficult in 16 pixels, but i get it.

Unplayable, but a neat proof of concept.

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