How to find out which favicon a browser actually uses - html

I have a new website with a set of favicon images auto generated from a source file using Real Favicon Generator, and there are:
9 Apple favicons
1 Android favicon
3 named favicons
1 Safari pinned SVG
1 json manifest
1 set of Microsoft tile image/colour
Obviously most of these can be placed for their respective vendors - Apple, Microsoft tiles, etc.
I have an issue in that running the website on Firefox, I want the favicon it uses to change but I do not know which one it actually uses?
I have read this question but the stated answer on here is incorrect and
Firefox and Safari will use the favicon that comes last.
is no longer true.
Obviously it's a time consuming repetition to go through ~15 images to find the one that gets changed on one browser, and I actually found that Firefox 42 selects the 96x96 dimension favicon, rather than the last one presented.
Question:
Is there a way [aside from trial and error] to load a page and then find a declaration in the browser defining which image from the HTML head is used as the page favicon in that browser?
Additional Information:
There is an incomplete reference list here. However, this misses out various versions and various OS, and I can only assume these details where found from trial and error.
While this is useful, the various links and solutions on that question give a single URL result for an automated process, such as
http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.domain.com
Which works fine in returning a valid favicon but it does not return the favicon that my browser uses when I tested it.
Other links from that question are similar, most only returned a 16x16 favicon and many clearly did not return the image used. Some probably didn't return the image used... it is hard to differentiate 16x16px sometimes!

You can use the Compatibility test of RealFaviconGenerator. The test will ask you which icon you see. But there is a twist: the test is not really for the end-user, so you will have to right-click the image corresponding to the icon you see, inspect it, and look at the alt attribute of the img tag. But that will prevent you from playing with 20+ images to make them different. Much easier!
Full disclosure: I'm the author of RealFaviconGenerator.
Note: I would be interested in your investigations to fix the answer you mention (I'm his author).

Using the Inspect Element, or just Inspect tool, available in Firefox and Chromium. The Network tab shows all http operations related to reload. Filtering by 'favicon' most likely peeks the correct operation, when the page is reloaded.
The fact that the browser downloads an image is a strong hint of what gets displayed. Yet, doubts can persist, e.g. which part of an .ICO. Unfortunately, the tab is a computed element not visible in the (computed) page source.
On Firefox, the iconuri is visible in the json code of exported bookmarks.

Related

How does `#:~:text=` in URL works to highlight text?

TL;DR
How/why are some browsers able to search and highlight text in the HTML body which is followed by #:~:text= in the URL?
Explanation
One day I was searching for something on Google, which lead me to Quora's result. I observed that 2 sentences were highlighted in yellow, which were part of URL after the aforementioned parameter. I thought this would be Quora's feature for SEO or something, however, also found this on Linkedin, and Medium, and so on.
I'd like to know:
What is this highlighting called? Why/how does it work?
This seems to be browser-specific. What kind of browsers support this?
It seems to work on Chrome and Edge; but not on Firefox, Safari, and IE.
Does a frontend programmer need to incorporate something in the code to have search engines highlight content on their web-pages? (Based on the assumption that search engines actually appends the relevant string predicted by user's query)
The highlighting is called Text Fragments. Its a new feature that was recently added to Chrome 80. It works by specifying a text snippet in the URL hash.
Yes it is browser specific.
No, the experience that you get when clicking on a link from Google's search results is part of Featured Snippets which are algorithmically determined. There is nothing you can incorporate into your code to prompt search engines to highlight text on your page.
There is no markup needed by webmasters. This happens automatically,
using Scroll To Text for HTML pages
https://chromestatus.com/feature/4733392803332096. See also more
background here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325
Sources:
https://web.dev/text-fragments/
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280115/google-search-engine-yellow-highlight-featured-snippet-anchor-text
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295300/google-link-to-text-fragment-chrome-extension-chromium-highlight-scroll-down
https://searchengineland.com/google-launches-featured-snippet-to-web-page-content-highlight-feature-335511
https://blog.chromium.org/2019/12/chrome-80-content-indexing-es-modules.html
While text fragments is natively implemented only in latest Google Chrome (and the latest versions of Chromium-based browsers, such as the new Microsoft Edge), there is a browser extension/add-on that seems to enable it on Firefox and Safari: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/link-to-text-fragment
It appears to use #ref-for-fragment-directive:~:text= and additional arguments (instead of just simple #:~:text=).
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/link-to-text-fragment/
Safari: https://apps.apple.com/app/link-to-text-fragment/id1532224396
Curiously enough, the extension has also been made available for Chrome and Edge too (!).
.
UPDATE: I'm testing it on Firefox Developer Edition, and it doesn't work for me.

Google Chrome not rendering PDF colours properly

When these PDFs are opened in browser in Google Chrome the colours are changed drastically, but when opened in another browser or opened in Preview on Mac the colours go back to normal.
It also doesnt occur in some other languages.
You can see in the screenshot below what it should display (top) and what it is displaying (bottom).
The first page consists of a single large JPEG2000 compressed image: 8 bit indexed color, 1276 x 1790 pixels.
A quick look at a comparison of browsers shows Chrome does not support JPEG2000 (officially at least, since you still got to see something).
There seem to be some plugins that add JPEG2000 support to Chrome, but
that is a local solution, it does not fix the issue for all users; and
Chrome uses its own internal PDF renderer, so it might not work "inside" PDFs.

Will linking to a lot of favicon image sizes make the page slower?

From this gist: https://gist.github.com/awesome/9947977, there are many options for adding the favicon graphic. Will many references to the tag slow down the page? Or is this just a bad idea?
Yes, but not that much.
Chrome and Firefox tend to load all PNG icons the first time they encounter the declaration, thus the "Yes". Subsequent browsing does not generate additional, unnecessary requests, thus the "not that much".
Also, I don't totally agree with the code you link to. In particular, all iOS PNG icons (such as favicon-57x57.png) are duplicated and won't be used (eclipsed by apple-touch-icon-57x57-precomposed.png in this example). But Chrome and FF will load them for no reason.
I rather advice you to use this favicon generator. The generated pictures and code support all major platforms and minimize overhead. Well, this is a matter of balance. Full disclosure: I'm the author of this site.
A hyperlink will not make the page load slower. if you want to display all of the icons on the page it will hardly effect the performance because of the low resolution.

Images not appearing in Google Chrome

I have an image (with a number in the image name - it's called ad1.jpg). Anyhow, it loads fine on any major browser I tested, yet it never seems to load on Google Chrome for some reason. I saw it once today, but aside from that, it's the old image title that appears instead of the image.
I am 150% sure that the problem is that Google Chrome is not properly reading the image name because of the number. Is there an actual problem with using number in image names using HTML5 standards? If not, does Chrome actually have a problem reading numbers in image names?
I had a similar problem, it was because of an 'Ad Blocker' installed on my browser. It read the word 'ad' and blocked it. Is it possible that is the problem?
If you refresh the page several times work? Clear cookies and cache and try again. Maybe this is problem.

Do browsers pre-load images in the CSS file, regardless of use on page?

A friend of mine threw a website I made through the tool at http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/ . When he came back to me, he insisted that my browser was preloading tons of unrelated images on only the homepage of the site.
I came back to him, insisting that YSlow (and other 'network' tabs in browsers) prove that only specifically-displayed images and content gets loaded on the homepage-- nothing else. I insisted that the statistics from that site are only for a complete visiting of the site, and downloading all the required images.
However, he's not convinced, believing that some browsers (i.e. IE) will pre-load that unrelated content regardless. For that reason, he uses a global CSS stylesheet, and then applies changes to individual pages by loading a separate stylesheet.
I thought it was best practice to minimize requests to the server, not to add more, which is why we have CSS sprites. I also thought browsers never load images unless they're needed to display the page.
I don't believe I can accept an answer without healthy discussion.
Am I correct in that the browser's not loading EVERYTHING on every page?
Is the above tool incorrect?
Is the lesson my friend's learning from the tool's results incorrect?
Thanks.
The browser will generally only load what's actually shown in the page. (There may however be exceptions in some exotic browsers, like Opera Mini.)
The WebSiteOptimization tool will only look at what images are referenced in the HTML and in the CSS, not which images are actally used in the page.
When I analyse my own webpage, which has eight different background images that are shown one at a time by random pick, the tool says that all eight images are loaded, just because they are in the CSS. Checking the network traffic in Firebug and IE developer tools shows that they aren't.
According to me
Browsers do load cached images at time but newer updates can check if the image has changed. Also there are permissions which coders can set to allow browser caching or not.
when using yslow or Google page speed which is a better tool try and use control+f5 to refresh your page so the site is forced reloaded without any offline files.
You can also set Brower permissions based on your preferences.
I also want to add a little about your last line a browser will load all images linked in the code even if there css property is hidden.
It always loads thing in the img tags first and then all images in the css code.
It will also process the image request in sequential order ie first come first server
I hope this help.