As specified in the Apple developer library, Safari allows developers to specify icons for home screen quick links to websites:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="touch-icon-iphone.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="76x76" href="touch-icon-ipad.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="120x120" href="touch-icon-iphone-retina.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="152x152" href="touch-icon-ipad-retina.png">
Now with 3D touch, the obvious use of this feature would be to specify 3D touch links to search, and other popular pages on your website.
I have been reading through the developer API, I cannot find if this is permitted, which leads me to believe it isn't, there also appears to be no discussion on SO regarding this.
Does anybody have a method they know of on how to do this?
There’s no existing API for this; if you’d like support for it, you should file an enhancement request.
Related
I'm currently struggling to get the apple-touch-icon to appear on mobile Phones. In Safari on my Laptop, the icon is displayed as as part of the tab and in my bookmarks. On mobile phones however, it does not show up. From my research, I should be doing it right but it still doesn't work. I'm testing it on a stage envrionment as the site I'm working on is not live yet.
This is my implementation of the apple-touch-icons:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/build/favicon/apple-touch-icon.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="152x152" href="/build/favicon/apple-touch-icon-152x152.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="167x167" href="/build/favicon/apple-touch-icon-167x167.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/build/favicon/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png" />
My project also contains a manifest.json file which contains all the paths and I reference it like this:
<link rel="manifest" href="manifest.json" crossorigin="use-credentials">
When I'm on the website, I can also open the manifest file in the dev tools, so the browser definitely has access to it.
Can anyone help me figure out what the problem might be here?
For anyone running into this issue - my "problem" ended up being testing on the stage environment. It worked in production. So the way I'm showing in the example is correct.
Are there any alternatives to the default option in web browsers, like chrome that allows me to add a link or button in my webapp and create an icon in homescreen?
For example, I have my webapp and i want a link or button in the main.html that execute an script and create the icon in the homescreen. It is not possible i think. So are there any alternatives that simulate this default option in web browsers?
Also i want to specify the icon that shows in the homescreen. How can i do that?
I want to specify the icon that shows in the home screen. How can i do that?
You can use <link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="128x128" href="niceicon.png"> (yes, even for Android device).
Please check iOS document for detail information on Apple devices. Please note you can even define icon for the entire website.
Please check Android document for detail information on Android devices. If <link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="128x128" href="niceicon.png"> does not work, you can try <link rel="icon" sizes="192x192" href="nice-highres.png">, which is the recommended method in Android.
Are there any alternatives that simulate this default option in web browsers?
You can check http://cubiq.org/add-to-home-screen for an alternative. "add-to-home-screen" will show an overlaying message encouraging user to add the web app to the homescreen.
Note: Thanks to adam0404's comment, cubiq.org link is broken now. Fortunately, the "add-to-home-screen" library was uploaded to GitHub, please check https://github.com/cubiq/add-to-homescreen
First line apply to Web and Android, second line apply to iOS omit sizes tag to specify only one icon.
if jpg
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/jpeg" href="favicon.jpg">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="favicon.jpg">
if png
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/png" href="favicon.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="favicon.png">
I have used the online tool RealFaviconGenerator to generate the favicons for my website, to support a variety of devices and browsers.
Most of my favicons have a transparent background, except for the apple-touch-icons as iOS adds a black background, which I do not want. So, I have manually added a white background and used that image instead for iOS.
The favicons work well with all the devices I have tested so far, except for Google Chrome on iOS (specifically, an iPad mini 1). What I want is the browser to use one of the icons with a transparent background, like it does on a computer (probably either favicon.ico or favicon.png). However, Chrome is instead using one of the apple-touch-icons, which has a white background.
My question is: Is this behaviour normal for Chrome on all iOS devices, or am I doing something wrong?
Additional Information:
I am not sure if this is relevant, but I am adding it anyway.
In order to make it easier to organise the favicon images, I put them all in a separate folder (instead of the root directory). However, I left the favicon.ico and browserconfig.xml files in the root folder, and removed the explicit links as the FAQ of the generator recommends so:
When your favicon is in the root directory, RealFaviconGenerator does
not generate this code. This is because it somehow confuses some other
browsers like Chrome. And since IE looks for a file named favicon.ico
anyway, the best solution is to not even talk about it.
By default, Internet Explorer 11 looks for browserconfig.xml at the
root of the web site.
Any help will be gladly accepted!
UPDATE:
This is what I have in my <head> now. Notice that I have also added the favicon.ico as a <link>. When I tried using this, it seemed to work fine at first, with iOS Chrome displaying the correct favicon. However, when I refreshed the page once, the favicon went back to the earlier white background one and remained the same.
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="57x57" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png?v=2">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="60x60" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-60x60.png?v=2">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="72x72" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png?v=2">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="76x76" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-76x76.png?v=2">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="114x114" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png?v=2">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="120x120" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-120x120.png?v=2">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="144x144" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-144x144.png?v=2">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="152x152" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-152x152.png?v=2">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/pics/icons/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png?v=2">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/pics/icons/favicon-32x32.png?v=2" sizes="32x32">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/pics/icons/android-chrome-192x192.png?v=2" sizes="192x192">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/pics/icons/favicon-96x96.png?v=2" sizes="96x96">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/pics/icons/favicon-16x16.png?v=2" sizes="16x16">
<link rel="manifest" href="/pics/icons/manifest.json?v=2">
<link rel="mask-icon" href="/pics/icons/safari-pinned-tab.svg?v=2" color="#5bbad5">
<meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#2d89ef">
<meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="/pics/icons/mstile-144x144.png?v=2">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#ffffff">
What you observe is normal, even if that's not what you want: iOS Chrome takes the Apple Touch icon for bookmark and favicon.ico for the regular tab icon. On an iPad Mini, it takes the 57x57 Touch icon and the embedded 16x16 pic of favicon.ico.
Android Chrome is not that different:
Add to home screen icon (no equivalent with iOS Chrome), tab icon and task switcher icon: icons declared in manifest.json.
Bookmark icon: the Apple Touch icon. Yep.
Long story short: there is no workaround. It would worth trying to remove all touch icons to see how iOS Chrome behaves, but this is not something you will do in production.
Oh, and as the author of RealFaviconGenerator, I congratulate you for this excellent choice :)
<link href='/favicon.ico' rel='icon' type='image/x-icon'/>
or
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
Have you tried this inside of your <head>? It works fine on my website. I have just tested it on Google Chrome for IOS.
After going through the page source, I found:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon image_src" href="//cdn.sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/apple-touch-icon.png?v=41f6e13ade69">
But even after I did that, my image still has a bored effect. My image is also a transparent png. Any ideas?
Here is my attempt (10.10.1 OS X Yosemite, Safari: Version 8.0.2):
I used this website to generate the favico:
http://realfavicongenerator.net
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="57x57" href="/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="114x114" href="/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="72x72" href="/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="144x144" href="/apple-touch-icon-144x144.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="60x60" href="/apple-touch-icon-60x60.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="120x120" href="/apple-touch-icon-120x120.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="76x76" href="/apple-touch-icon-76x76.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="152x152" href="/apple-touch-icon-152x152.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon-96x96.png" sizes="96x96">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon-16x16.png" sizes="16x16">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon-32x32.png" sizes="32x32">
<meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#da532c">
<meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="/mstile-144x144.png">
Two things in this answer:
How I did to reproduce StackOverflow's behavior
Why this may not be a good idea
How to reproduce StackOverflow's behavior
What I did:
Download http:////cdn.sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/apple-touch-icon.png
Submit this picture to RealFaviconGenerator (full disclosure: I'm the author of this site)
Put the generated pics and HTML in a test web site
Access it with Safari and add a bookmark
I got your expected result, ie. a transparent background.
This is basically what you did, so there must be something wrong. A few tips:
There can be a lot of issues with favicon, whatever the browser. They often cache the old icon and do not load the new one. Sometimes they do not load your icon at all, but load it if you wait a few seconds. And so on. My advice: try to use another domain to make sure you start from a fresh state.
Maybe your test web site as some additional stuff that can conflict with your actual test. For example, if you have a file apple-touch-icon.png in your root directory, Safari may load it, even if it is not declared in your HTML code.
Why this may not be a good idea
Mac OS Safari relies on the Touch icon, primarily designed for iOS. It is mainly used for the "Add to home screen" feature. In that case, iOS prevents transparency and fills transparent regions with black. Add StackOverflow.com to the home screen and you get:
Honestly the result is okay, but is this really what SO expected? Your choice.
I figured out the problem here.
The farthest one on the right has a TLD of .io
The center one has a TLD of .com
They are exact clones, the same code on. So it must be because the domain TLD is not .com/.net
Edit:
To further recap information I found about this. It seems like adding a www in front of my domain, allows it to be fully transparent.
mysite.com works
www.mysite.com works
mysite.io doesn't work
www.mysite.io works
Transparent Apple Touch icons are indeed possible. What you need to do is strip all excess information from the PNG using ImageOptim for Mac or a similar program on Windows. I did extensive research and stumbled on the answer by looking at the Apple Touch icon used by the Virtual DJ site. This icon keeps its transparent background on iOS and MacOS Sierra. I looked at the file size and realized how small it was compared to the custom apple touch icons with transparency that I made for my favorites in Safari. Next I looked at the file information using the inspector in Mac's Preview app. All of my custom apple touch icons had four tabs in the inspector section named General, exif, PNG and TIFF. The virtual DJ icon only had two tabs named PNG and General. Once I ran my custom images through ImageOptim the file sizes plummeted by over 90% and the extra TIFF and exif tabs disappeared from the inspector in Preview. Sure enough once I reloaded my custom images and launched Safari all of my Favorites tabs have transparent backgrounds!
According to the Twitter bootstrap documentation, you set the apple-touch-icon-precomposed icons and your general favicon as follows:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="144x144" href="assets/ico/apple-touch-icon-144-precomposed.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="assets/ico/apple-touch-icon-114-precomposed.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="assets/ico/apple-touch-icon-72-precomposed.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="assets/ico/apple-touch-icon-57-precomposed.png">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="assets/ico/favicon.png">
This is all fine and dandy, but I can't seem to find any major websites that are actually using these link tags to do this - is there a reason or another way to make the icons available?
I have checked:
Google
Bing
Facebook
Twitter homepage
Do any of the major websites use apple-touch-icon-precomposed favicons?
If so, where are they / how do they do it? If not, why not?
If you include them directly under the document root that works too. We had a problem on our website where Apple was not able to find the icons. I wasn't involved in that, though, and I just heard about it, but the solution was just to put the icons directly under the document root.