Favicons are used more than robots.txt, and I want that to grow

2022-02-08 | #favicon #gemini | @Acidus

Fun fact: More capsules include a favicon.txt file than include a robots.txt file. A quick survey shows 130 robots.txt files and 158 favicon.txt files across 1382 active capsules. That means over 11% of capsules use favicons! For fun, here they all are:

Apparently the rocket is quite popular 😂

@Mozz did a similar survey in March 2021 and found 107 favicons, despite no clients or services really using them at the time. This means 50% growth in favicons in less than a year!

Favicons In The Wild (2021)

I think this wide-ish use of favicons is important, especially given all the angst and drama the idea of favicons has caused. In the end, the data shows that users and authors like favicons and are continuing to create them. And they are doing this even more than they are making robots.txt files, which has its own official companion spec!

Gemini robots.txt companion spec

As someone who writes crawlers and runs a search engine, the penetration of robots.txt makes me sad, as wider adoption would make my job a lot easier. But that is a post for another day! As someone who loves the idea of favicons, these statistics make me quite happy.

I'd like to see the use of favicons grow on 2 fronts:

More capsules including favicon.txt

More services and clients finding interesting uses for favicons

👷 Why you should add a favicon

Because they are simple and fun! Deciding what emoji you want is 98% of the effort!

Seriously though, you should add a favicon because that enables Gemini services and clients to use them in fun and innovative ways. For example, Kennedy, a gemini search engine I created, uses favicons like this:

Favicons in use on Kennedy Search

I added favicons to Kennedy because I think it makes it easier to see results from different domains when you are skimming the search results. Seeing symbols like "Bear, bear, bear, oh Robot!" is better than mental parsing names like "max.catz-fu.xyz." (mental note: catz-fu is a great domain name I should register)

Try Kennedy yourself

Gemini clients can do something with them as well. It's happened in the past, and I hope when people see how wide spread favicons are, clients will invent of new ways to use them again. In fact, I have an initial idea for that:

📠 Party like its Internet Explorer 5 in 1999!

Favicons were create by Microsoft in 1999 for Internet Explorer 5. IE5 used them as site-specific icons that would be shown when looking at your list of bookmarks (which Microsoft annoying called "Favorites" instead of "Bookmarks" because they wanted to be different than Netscape). That's why favicons are called "favicons" and the filename they used was "favicon.ico": it's short for "favorites icon".

Favicon history on Wikipedia

Why do I bring this all up? Because currently the bookmarks UI in many clients is... a little boring:

Plain bookmarks example 1

Plain bookmarks example 2

Lagrange comes closer by giving you an option to select an icon when bookmarking, but its blank by default and requires action from the user.

Instead, clients could replace those "Letter + solid color squares" with favicons. Even better, using a favicon in a client when bookmarking side-steps the whole "1 request and 1 request only" battle people were fighting. It's not an extra request when loading a page! The user did an action (bookmarking a site) and a request was made for that action! Crises averted, UI improved, more favicons used!

Getting Started

Have a capsule? Go add a favicon to it!

Emoji Favicons in Gemini

Create a Gemini client? Create a gemini service? Try thinking of fun ways having a symbol to represent a capsule could make your client or service better. And then... just do it.

Also, @alex at Flounder? Can you make choosing an emoji and setting that as the favicon part of the on-boarding process for Flounder? That alone would have a huge impact of the number of favicons 😂 🐟