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It’s interesting to read about how it actually happened, but it does seem like one of those inevitable features that would’ve been added sooner or later.

by qzw 6y ago

necovek 6y ago
What do you consider inevitable about it? It feels like bookmarks are falling out of fashion, at least in that nobody looks at them in their traditional list format, and they are mostly useful for url bar autocompletion. And I don't remember seeing favicons of random web sites in the URL bar, which is how they were otherwise prominently featured when introduced. So if anything, I would say their existence was short-lived but their demise was inevitable ;) More interesting feature that was introduced with IE (3 I think) was link hovering, and Netscape only caught up with 4.0 which took ages to come out. That has changed the accepted styling for hyperlinks forever and was the first instance of smooth non-JS "animations" in wide use! Another interesting thing was the "active desktop" that came out with IE4 I think, though that never caught on. It was still fun to put a web page as your desktop background on NT4 which I used during that time before moving full time to GNU/Linux.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  Favicons live on in the tab.
  - visarga 6y ago
    Not just live on, but are essential in navigation. I have so many open tabs that the favicon is the only differentiating thing between them. When I last tried to switch to FF from Chrome the lack of pre-cached favicons made all my bookmarks look like shit and I just couldn't stand it, so I bounced back.
    - kozziollek 6y ago
      Just closed and reopened FF 79 and all icons are right there where I have left them.
    - yoavm 6y ago
      On Firefox, you could go to the Library and right click the Bookmarks folder, choose "Open all in tabs". It'll take a moment but all your icons should be fetched afterwards.
  - necovek 6y ago
    Good point — I stand corrected, thanks!
- stevula 6y ago
  In Chrome, I like to remove the names of all the bookmarks in the bookmark bar to save space. It is just a row of icons for me.

It’s interesting to read about how it actually happened, but it does seem like one of those inevitable features that would’ve been added sooner or later.

by qzw 6y ago

It’s interesting to read about how it actually happened, but it does seem like one of those inevitable features that would’ve been added sooner or later.

necovek 6y ago

What do you consider inevitable about it? It feels like bookmarks are falling out of fashion, at least in that nobody looks at them in their traditional list format, and they are mostly useful for url bar autocompletion. And I don't remember seeing favicons of random web sites in the URL bar, which is how they were otherwise prominently featured when introduced. So if anything, I would say their existence was short-lived but their demise was inevitable ;) More interesting feature that was introduced with IE (3 I think) was link hovering, and Netscape only caught up with 4.0 which took ages to come out. That has changed the accepted styling for hyperlinks forever and was the first instance of smooth non-JS "animations" in wide use! Another interesting thing was the "active desktop" that came out with IE4 I think, though that never caught on. It was still fun to put a web page as your desktop background on NT4 which I used during that time before moving full time to GNU/Linux.

im3w1l 6y ago
Favicons live on in the tab.
- visarga 6y ago
  Not just live on, but are essential in navigation. I have so many open tabs that the favicon is the only differentiating thing between them. When I last tried to switch to FF from Chrome the lack of pre-cached favicons made all my bookmarks look like shit and I just couldn't stand it, so I bounced back.
  - kozziollek 6y ago
    Just closed and reopened FF 79 and all icons are right there where I have left them.
  - yoavm 6y ago
    On Firefox, you could go to the Library and right click the Bookmarks folder, choose "Open all in tabs". It'll take a moment but all your icons should be fetched afterwards.
- necovek 6y ago
  Good point — I stand corrected, thanks!
stevula 6y ago
In Chrome, I like to remove the names of all the bookmarks in the bookmark bar to save space. It is just a row of icons for me.