[plorntus]

I guess the problem is when you want to quickly provide a favicon with the search result (beit in the omnibar or actual search page), as you're typing and results are being displayed you cannot send off a request to the site, wait for HTML html to finish up downloading, send off a request to the manifest if its defined for multiple sites at once.

On a technical level of course its doable but in reality it's a complete waste of data and processing, not to mention it could take a long time to show up. I imagine they have these favicons all cached on their side so they can quickly send the right file down and/or do this processing if needed.

That being said maybe they should just not use a favicon if it's that big of a deal.

[akersten]

Oh, this is for putting an icon next to search results? Yeah, that changes the calculus considerably. I thought this was about showing the favicon in the browser for a site the user visits (per the issue title).

In that case, yeah, I don't think the icons are necessary to show at all...

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Even if you wanted to implement this, the logic of the service could be directly embedded in the browser as an extension or similar. There’s no reason to depend on a network service for this functionality.

[saalweachter]

I feel like the only user benefit is to see the favicons of sites you are familiar with, so caching those locally after you visit sites is probably good enough.