The Firefox 1.x bookmarks system would not store favicons for bookmarks larger than 16K (bug 252401). Some sites have unusually large favicons which don't get stored properly (bug 258867). The current places system ups the maximum to 32K. However, we now store favicons for every site the user visits. Storing thismuch data is not reaonable and will cause their bookmarks_history.sqlite file to be very large and may degrade performance. We should lower the maximum size for favicons to 16K or maybe even 12K for normal history items. We can keep the size for bookmarked items at 32K or even raise it if some sites have >32K favicons (probably not).

> However, we now store favicons for every site the user visits. > Storing this much data is not reasonable and will cause their > bookmarks_history.sqlite file to be very large and may > degrade performance. I have seen some pretty big history files (from mossop, ispiked, etc). I'll check to confirm that if this is partly to explain them.

Since this won't affect too many favicons, we'll take the tradoff in favour of perf.

On a related note, sites like http://www.howstuffworks.com (which as a 50 KB + favicon, see http://static.howstuffworks.com/en-us/www/misc/favicon.ico) will not show a favicon in the url bar search results.

looking closer at howstuffworks' large favicon, it has multiple resolutions with various color depths. on the fly, for favicons over our limit, could we pull out the "best" resolution / depth for us, convert it to a data url, and store that as the favicon?

spun off the howstuffworks / large favicon issue to bug #389273

Unless I'm mistaken, the browser always shows favicons at 16x16... For uncompressed RGBA pixels, that's only 1024 bytes... It would also be easy to do PNG encoding/scaling with a <canvas> or imgIImageEncoder.

Bug 389273 has landed and made this problem irrelevant... Large favicons are loaded, scaled, and reencoded -- so there is no longer a max favicon size.

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Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h". In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows: Tools | Message Filters Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New" Conditions: Body contains places-to-b-and-h Change the action to "Delete Message". Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top. Click OK. Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter. Gerv