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Pie charts in your favicon (lipka.github.com)
232 points by johntdyer on Aug 3, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 33 comments



Last time I checked (~3 months ago) canvas rendered favicons lead to HUGE memory leaks in Chrome.

I love this effect, but I had to remove it from my app. If you were only using it on a page that is navigated away from, then this will work great, most likely.


Looks like lipka is aware of that: https://github.com/lipka/piecon/issues/1


From 99% to 100% I got a huge lagspike on chrome. Everything stopped for ~1s.


Can you put a link to the actual github page on this page (for the lazy).

https://github.com/lipka/piecon



Now this is the kind of library I like. Not something difficult, or complicated. Just a small, fun library that does one thing and does it well.


I feel like this would be rather annoying and distracting. I could just imagine my 10+ tabs in Firefox having a pie chart or something blinking instead of a plain image.

It feels like were devolving to the old websites of flashy and blinking images trying to lure people in. Don't get me wrong though, it is neat! But... Where is that disable favicon extension now?


A possible use case could be upload/download large files


Already implemented it in my uploader, but after hearing reports of a memory leak in Chrome I may need to remove it again. Hopefully it gets fixed soon.


Another thing is that the fav icon is too small to use for any meaningful notification.


Wait for the 4x favicon!


OMG. This literally will solve a UI issue that chizzl.com (my lil start-up that could) has been trying to solve for 2 months. Bless this lib and bless Ycomb!


This looks just like the one used in the new Flickr Upload page http://www.flickr.com/photos/upload/. Are they related?


It's not a pie chart but just a progress indicator? An actual pie chart could have an arbitrary amount of slices in arbitrary angles.

This might be useful for slow file uploads, but eventually animated favicons will be abused and subsequently disabled in later browser versions. See "window.status".


This is cool. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me in Safari 6.0 on OS X 10.8. The title updates but the favicon stays as the default GitHub icon: http://imgur.com/kIzXX


https://github.com/lipka/piecon

Browser Support

Piecon has been tested to work completely in the following browsers (older versions may be supported, but haven't been tested):

- Chrome 15+ - Firefox 9+ - Opera 11+ Currently the library falls back to title updates for the following browsers:

- Internet Explorer 9 - Safari 5


Memory leaks aside in Chrome, this is amazing and I can't wait to see how people use this.


It would be useful to tie this in with something like YouTube, where the pie graph represents how much of the video has been buffered.

Similarly for a page that auto-refreshes, it could indicate that interval.


I am not sure about the Youtube since they have stopped buffering the whole video in one go. It just waits at the 30sec mark for you to cover the first 10sec and then jumps another 30sec, so on. Guess, its some bandwidth saving technique.


those are both excellent use cases. file uploads too


Neat. Reminds me of the favicon tetris.

This could be very useful for an in-tab "progress bar".


In case anyone else hasn't seen this: http://favris.info/


It seems to work in Firefox 15.0 as well as Chromium.


Talking about bleeding edge; look at those browser requirements!


Well rephrased, everyone using Chrome and almost everyone using Firefox, since 15 and 9 are eons ago for those two. Pretty sure that's a decent percentage (40+ accord to StatCounter?)


love it! great way to show progress while I keep working on another tab while waiting.


No favicon change in Opera 12.


Ack, the first image is shown, then the github favicon appears again and blinks at every update of the pie chart (probably showing the pie chart for a fraction of a second).

User-Agent: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; en) Presto/2.10.289 Version/12.00


Works for me.


I think I read that Firefox might be ditching the favicon in the location bar for some reason?


It is because some shady sites were putting a lock icon as the favicon to make you think it was secured so the tab is the better place for them.


One reason may be tabnapping. The risk was described by Aza Raskin while he was at Mozilla.

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attac...


They still have it in the tab. Don't worry - the favicon won't disappear!




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