Open Bug 1511596 Opened 6 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Auto-fetching favicons in bookmarks toolbar

Categories

(Toolkit :: Places, enhancement, P5)

Product:
Toolkit
Component:
Places
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: k.bumsik, Unassigned)

References

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0 Steps to reproduce: Currently items in the bookmarks toolbar shows a favicon only when you click the item. Other browsers such as Chrome and Safari automatically fetches favicon in the list. Is this intended feature, or is it a feature that can be considered? I would like to contribute to add this feature if it is fine.
Component: Untriaged → Toolbars and Customization
Version: 63 Branch → Trunk
I think we'll show a favicon if we have one in our favicon storage, but won't proactively fetch them if you manually create bookmarks for sites you haven't navigated to (or import such bookmarks from other browsers). There would be privacy implications in automatically fetching them, and I don't know whether we're purposefully not doing this or something. Marco?
Component: Toolbars and Customization → Bookmarks & History
Flags: needinfo?(mak77)
There are privacy implications that we didn't solve yet and it's not in our (enginnering) power to solve, we need privacy/legal involvement to understand those implications. At this time this is not a priority.
Flags: needinfo?(mak77)
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Priority: -- → P5
Component: Bookmarks & History → Places
Product: Firefox → Toolkit

Some people would like the option to disable fetching favicons from their bookmarks. It's very easy to fingerprint someone's device based on their bookmarks. In Firefox for iOS, Safari for iOS, Brave for iOS, and pretty much all browsers, a connection is made to the bookmarked site whenever I open the browser.

Requests are presumably for favicons, but I don't know how to confirm. If it's the case that we're fetching them, I'd like to disable it. Or we should be routing favicons through Firefox servers, perhaps sync with firefoxusercontent.com.

Otherwise, it's pretty obvious who is online when the same cluster of sites is requested.

Wondering if I should open a bug specifically for Firefox iOS app or what. This seemed the most similar existing bug report.

(In reply to caleforniabyers from comment #4)

Some people would like the option to disable fetching favicons from their bookmarks. It's very easy to fingerprint someone's device based on their bookmarks. In Firefox for iOS, Safari for iOS, Brave for iOS, and pretty much all browsers, a connection is made to the bookmarked site whenever I open the browser.

Requests are presumably for favicons, but I don't know how to confirm. If it's the case that we're fetching them, I'd like to disable it. Or we should be routing favicons through Firefox servers, perhaps sync with firefoxusercontent.com.

Firefox Desktop doesn't fetch favicons automatically.

Bug 428378 has many of the same considerations and discussions, but for bookmarks etc which come into the local browser via sync.

See Also: → https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378
Severity: normal → S3
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