How do rich icons work? (why not automate the process?)

CoreyCorey
CoreyCorey
Community Member
edited January 2020 in Lounge

1Password team,

If you don't mind, I'd like to understand:

  1. Why are you maintaining a human-dependent database for this?
  2. Why are you not just downloading the favicons from websites like every browser does? This could even use our own internet connections when we're not on 1Password.com and when we are on 1Password.com a simple caching system on your end would be more than sufficient for this. Image proxying and caching are pretty simple and straightforward.

There must be a good reason for you to do it in a way that significantly increases your required work/time and creates a much worse customer experience of missing icons and outdated icons. I see no advantages to it, but I must be missing something.

Would you mind sharing why it works this way? I couldn't find an answer from searching.


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Comments

  • CoreyCorey
    CoreyCorey
    Community Member
    edited January 2020

    I found a vague comment that indicated one reason may be security, but I think that's a poor reason at this stage of your company. Your team is more than capable of building software that can download a simple icon file, determine if it's valid, and display the valid icons in a way that does not open your software to exploits, especially if you spent as much time on it as you have maintaining this icon database by hand. It's very inefficient and a poor use of your team's time.

    Another possible reason is you want larger icons, but smaller icons would really be just fine. Your designers could make them work without a problem. For example, the smaller icons could be aligned to the top left and then the extra space could be used for something else. Or move things around a bit.

    It'd seem like a better use of time to find a permanent solution that doesn't require additional time from your team after it's finished rather than to continue down this human-dependent route.

    It'd also give websites more control over how their websites are represented in your software without using up more of your time.

  • Hi @CoreyCorey

    At one point this was more of an automated process but the results weren't necessarily any better than the current process. When the automated process broke we didn't invest the time to fix it. As far as I'm aware security is not the primary roadblock to doing so. Perhaps now that we're in a better position to expand our teams (particularly development teams) we'll be able to re-evaluate this situation and see if we can again get some sort of automated process going.

    Ben

This discussion has been closed.