How to disable favicons?

henks

Hi, I would like to know how to completely disable the loading, caching, and displaying of website favicons in Vivaldi. I just want no favicons in the tabs, not in the bookmarks, nowhere at all. Is there a way to achieve this? Searched but couldn't find info about some kind of favicons on-off setting, would be grateful for a tip or suggestion... Thanks!

Pathduck

@henks Hello.

First of all: Why? Are you sure you're talking about actual favicons and not site thumbnails?

Second: AFAIK there is no option to turn off favicons, except for in the Bookmarks bar. But feel free to create a feature request for it: https://forum.vivaldi.net/category/113/feature-requests

You could probably do it with a custom CSS mod, but it would likely be a lot of places to change; tabs, panels, bookmarks, history, quick commands etc.
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/10549/modding-vivaldi

A Former User

@Pathduck said in How to disable favicons?:

You could probably do it with a custom CSS mod

There’s the problem that CSS cannot prevent loading & caching the favicon…

Pathduck

@potmeklecbohdan True
(also - nitpicker!)

A Former User

@Pathduck Well…

disable the loading, caching,

henks

Thanks for your reaction, @Pathduck .

Yes I'm talking about actual favicons. The why? Well, it's not only I personally find them useless and so they only take up screen space in tabs and the bookmarks bar (and If you don't need them, they also use a little bandwidth unnecessarily).

My main reason is better privacy. Nowadays, some websites have started a practice of loading specially specially crafted site favicons in the browser's favicons cache: these favicons are then used more or less like cookies, only more persistent. They're not meant to be displayed, but by checking for the presence of these favicons in one's browser cache, sites can use them for tracking.

For a scientific source about this sneaky new way of user tracking through favicons, see the paper Tales of Favicons and Caches: Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers by Konstantionos Solomos et al. (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago). For a brief summary, see for example this post in the TechHerald: Security researchers reveal how the humble ‘Favicon’ can track users across all major web browsers despite deep cleaning internet history.

The best way to block this tracking-through-favicons is to simply stop the browser from loading and caching favicons. In Firefox, this can be done by a fairly simple setting in about:config (see the post Favicons may be used to track users on Martin Brinkmann's Ghacks blog).

I'm using Firefox already with no site favicons being loaded and cached (and therefore also not displayed anywhere), and I can tell you that in daily browsing I don't miss these little website icons at all. So, now I am looking for some similar way to block favicons in Vivaldi.

If no usable solution comes up here, I will follow your advice and make this a (somewhat urgent) feature request. Thanks so far!

Streptococcus

I cannot stop the favicons from being displayed, but I can stop them from being saved. I did that by closing Vivaldi, finding the Favicons file in the Default subdirectory of the Vivaldi profile and removing it. Then I launched Vivaldi and immediately closed it again, and made the new empty Favicons file read-only. Now it cannot be written, and my bookmarks do not contain favicons.

Fliderisand

I would like to disable favicon, when the "2 rows of tabs" mode is enabled. Because let's say there is a "Fun" folder and the icon is constantly changing there - Spotify, Netflix, and etc. Very annoying. I would like to have just a text, without any icons on the side

janvangessel

Hi Guys

Just started a new thread on this, not realizing this one already existed.
My main concern is security.

Gwen: as far as I know there is <link rel="icon" in the head section and if that doesn't exist then the browser makes an automatic request to the default location /favicon.ico.

I always thought/assumed that then, if it wasn't one of those two use cases, it would be treated as a normal image.

Are there other ways to fetch favicons and making it so that Vivaldi saves them into the "special" favicon cache?

Dancer18

I'm just wondering to what extent my extensions are already doing the job of preventing tracking with favicons.

I'm using Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin.

janvangessel

Just found this on w3.org: How to Add a Favicon to your Site
https://www.w3.org/2005/10/howto-favicon
Its a little bit dated but as far as I can tell still valid.

janvangessel

Hi Gwen
Maybe I'm missing something but as far as I understand it, it says basically the same thing as I did, just in a much more formal way.

It refers to "Link type "icon" and the rest is about how to interpret the attributes and "In the absence of a link with the icon keyword,".... "Let request be a new request whose url is the URL record obtained by resolving the URL "/favicon.ico" AND WHAT HAPPENS THEN

Is there any other way?

janvangessel

Sorry those capital letters were not intended, I'm not shouting and no disrespect is intended.
Just curious how all this works, as a smalltime freelance developer

janvangessel

I agree.
In order to do this it needs to do two things:

detect and block all rel=icon and rel=shortcut icon links.
It is already detecting them as the favicons are treated differently and directed to their own cache.
And block the default behavior of Vivaldi (chromium?).

In reference to Dancer18: the blockers might be able to block the link, but I'm not sure if they can disable the browser's default behaviour.
Would be interesting to find out though

greybeard

@Streptococcus Good Idea !! I used to something similar with cookies that were sored in a "Cookies.txt" file. After closing the browser (IE maybe(?)) I deleted the file then created a Folder named Cookies.txt.
On analysis afterward it was always empty.
Perhaps that may work here(?).
Not sure about the "favicon.journal" file. It is 0 bytes on my machine but I bet it is some kind of database perhaps hidden.

[EDIT] I did come across an old VBS file. and a Powershell version (I suppose Python will also work) where you delete the contents of a text base file (which favicons is SVG + URL). So you would close the browser, navigate to the 'favicon' file then take the full path to enter into a script to

Pseudo Code:
open the file
write "null" to it (Nothing)
close & save the file
set its attributes to RO

It would become an empty file with Read Only attributes
Too tired to try it now... Tomorrow sometime

Hate to say it but the experiment didn't work for me.

In Powershell there is the :

Clear-Content
Module:
Microsoft.PowerShell.Management
Deletes the contents of an item, but does not delete the item.

The item in this case is a file and it does turn the file to a zero byte file... for a few seconds but it returns to its original size.
I think I am missing something here. This seems to be a shared file !??!

[EDIT-yes-again] More to Say
OK I think I found something out now. Two things:

the First, the favicon is more than a file but a Stream
Altho (in Windows) you can delete the file's contents with Powershell or VBS, the stream remains and repopulates the file. If you delete the stream you get an error message
the Second is that in the research I've done I've found you can Open the Favicons file (Copy it to the desktop or somewhere first and open the copy) by using SQlite 3.x.x or any of the latest SQlite Managers/Browsers. Even the FF Add-on.
I would definitely advise not to mess around with the data !!
My computer would go up in flames.

Catweazle

I found this extension, but I don't know what to think of this app, it's not OSS.
It comes from Foxyproxy.org, which I do not know.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nuke-private-data/gkoljcoplahakfnegfggjejbpmghicpg

I just installed it and I'm testing it, it certainly radically erases any trace

janvangessel

@Gwen-Dragon my main concern is security, for me personally I understand and accept that if you block favicons, that they won't get used anywhere.
As I understand that blocking them is a bit radical and not everybody's cup of tea, I suggested putting it as a flag instead of as an option in settings. But I think it should be available.

On another note: I wonder if favicons are saved by the browser when browsing in Private mode.
If they are, then you can be tracked by websites even when browsing privately, at least within the same domain.

Does anybody know?

janvangessel

@Fliderisand as this is an issue of the GUI you might be able to make your own wish come true by using user css
If you're up for it here you can find some info to get you started:
https://letswp.io/customize-vivaldi-browser-with-custom-css/

If you search for it you'll probably find lots more ideas and examples, check out reddit as wel

Dancer18

@Dancer18 said in How to disable favicons?:

Privacy Badger

@Gwen-Dragon
I posted this here before asking if the addon Privacy Badger will block favicon-tracking.

Nobody answered so far.

EDIT:// I also installed the extension ClearURLs that removes tracking-elements out of URLs.

Streptococcus

@guigirl
My solution was sufficient for my needs. I did not want my bookmarks file to be bloated to huge proportions by a bunch of stupid icons.