Last modified: 2014-09-24 01:27:45 UTC
Every page on the Wikipedia outputs headers similar to the following: <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/apple-touch-icon.png" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" /> These headers are unnecessary because (in this case) the locations are the default location for the files concerned. They will be checked anyway by user-agents that make use of such files, so pointing to them is a waste of space (137 bytes uncompressed, ~28 bytes gzipped; about 0.2% of the page, but a more significant portion of the <head>). Apple touch icon reference: http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/ConfiguringWebApplications/ConfiguringWebApplications.html Shortcut icon reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537656%28VS.85%29.aspx Before these links are output, the rendering code should check that they do not match the defaults, perhaps by expanding them with wfExpandUrl and comparing the two. If so, it should not output the links. (The documentation for these variables should be updated to indicate this feature.) The protocol and host name of the apple-touch-icon also appears unnecessary; a relative path should be sufficient to specify a path on the current server. If that is removed too, it's worth testing setting an iPhone bookmark with a https: URL, just to ensure it still works.
Created attachment 6272 [details] Change $wgFavicon default from '/favicon.ico' to false User agents will look for /favicon.ico without us telling them about it. There is therefore no need to output it by default. Documentation update required at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgFavicon if committed.
Created attachment 6273 [details] Don't output links if $wgFavicon or $wgAppleTouchIcon are equivalent to their defaults If the above patch to DefaultSettings is not merged but this one is, an additional check for '/favicon.ico' != $wgFavicon may be appropriate after the null check but before the wfExpandUrl check, to save the expense of expanding.
Created attachment 6274 [details] Unified version of patch 6272, patch 6273 Resubmitting in unified format diffed from SVN
Applied in r53841.
Reverted in r55588. Brion seems to think it won't work in Firefox, and testing in Chrome seems to say the same thing.
This does not appear to be the case here. Try http://stats.wikifur.com/ for an example. Works for me in both Chrome and Firefox, latest versions. If you have a negative cache hit for favicon.ico for a site, that will cause the favicon not to show up if you subsequently put a favicon.ico file there but do not clear the cache, and do not explicitly indicate the presence of one in your HTML.
In theory this should work fine, at least for favicon. Originally favicon didn't have a link tag at all, it was hardcoded to /favicon.ico. So all browsers should support retrieving it from that location if there's no link tag.
Apple specifies (above) that the sitewide icon be put in the root folder; the <link> is only intended as a page-specific override.
To clarify: "that the apple-touch-icon be put in the root folder..."
Laurence, thank you for your patch. From the comments, I infer that the open question of whether your patch works means that it still needs review, so I've added the "need-review" keyword on this bug. If you'd like to and you have time, I invite you to ensure that your patch still applies to current trunk in SVN, and possibly revise and update it if it doesn't. Thanks again.
Why not drop the Microsoft file format and standardize on PNG? <link rel="shortcut icon" href=/favicon.png type=image/png />
Internet Explorer does not support PNG files as favicons.
I believe MSIE 7 and newer support png favicons. I think MSIE 6 users will have about 100 other shortcomings to worry about before they come to the missing favicon, but I have no problem with providing an .ico file too, if someone wants to make the effort. (As long as we’re taking pains to provide proprietary formats for obsolete browsers, why don’t we start including video and audio in mpeg4 for the millions of visitors who can’t use .ogg?)
Belief is insufficient in this case. Internet Explorer does not support PNG files as favicons. (On the plus side, Windows 8 *does* support PNG files as tile icons.) http://www.jonathantneal.com/blog/understand-the-favicon/
The Apple Touch icon part is now fixed with Gerrit change #60777. We now have 'wgAppleTouchIcon' => array( 'default' => false, ) which means that MediaWiki will not generate links to Touch icons in HTML <head /> tag, and will make iOS use the default 'apple-touch-icon.png' file located in domain docroot, which it looks for by default anyway. Project-specific icons, and icons for projects without a docroot (for instance $lang.wiktionary.org) should be committed into docroot/bits/apple-touch/ and defined in InitialiseSettings.php, for instance: 'dewiktionary' => '//bits.wikimedia.org/apple-touch/wiktionary/de.png', Some good ideas about the actual creation of such icons are gathered in bug 27911.
