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Comment by Semiapies | Hacker News Reader

Because we could usefully distinguish billions of sites by their tiny little icons?

ETA: To expand, I just opened the top 12 stories on HN right this moment in new tabs. I recognized the NYT logo in one favicon and the Apple logo in another. Of the other eight that did have favicons, those little icons told me absolutely nothing useful. A few of those sites did indicate their names in the titles, however.

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I can distinguish the icons of every site I visit on a semi-regular basis.

And you never visit any other sites?

How useful to you is an unfamiliar favicon, or a row of tabs with an assortment of unfamiliar favicons?

An unfamiliar favicon lets me know I am not somewhere I normally would be, and to regard the site I am at more suspiciously. Without familiar favicons, I would treat every site that way before looking at the page more thoroughly. Obviously I do not rely solely on favicons, but they are a good initial way of orienting myself when looking at tabs.

In other words, the favicon is only useful for familiar sites or for knowing a page isn't from a familiar site. It's of absolutely no use in any other case, whereas a site name or a domain in the title tag will actually tell me what the site is in all cases.

There is a meta pattern I recognise in my tab bar sometimes - I get pairs of unfamiliarfavicon:hackernewsfavicon.

That it actually quite useful when I flick back to a random browser window after being distracted... ("Ahhh, that's my timewasting window!")

I guess you're not blind :)

Having only icons would be such an accessibility disaster.

Do you really regularly visit billions of sites?

I visit more than a handful. How useful do you think a dozen unfamiliar favicons on my tabs or bookmarks are?

And why would I have to visit billions of sites? The issue is that billions of sites exist, and a random little picture tells me nothing about what site it's from unless I already have it memorized.

Do you really want to distinguish a site by the title attribute? Think about it, a site already has two "branding elements": favicon and domain. Why not leave the title for just content, the thing that the site visitor is most likely interested in?

I don't know about you, but domains don't show up on my tabs or my bookmarks (unless I open one's properties). Only the title and the favicon do, and unlike the favicon, the title isn't a tiny picture that's only useful if I go to a site enough to recognize it.

If you bookmarked a page on an unfamiliar site, chances are it's the content of the page that you bookmarked it for, not the name of the site.

1) Then why worry about the favicon? You're being circular.

2) Chances are also that I might want to know which site something came from at a glance.

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