Margaret Leibovic

Most websites only provide a 16x16px favicon, but what can we do if we want a larger icon to represent a site? Faaborg had an idea to use the dominant color of this favicon to color the background of a box surrounding the icon. Yesterday I used the canvas API to prototype this idea for a new tab page, and it turned out pretty well!

I generalized my dominant color function a bit and posted it in a gist, in case anyone else might find it useful! You can also grab the latest UX branch nightly build if you want to see this new tab page prototype in action.

Update: Mardak wrote a neat restartless add-on that lets you test this algorithm (or any variation you come up with) on images on the web.

In tomorrow’s Nightly build, you will notice the site identity block is sleeker looking than it was before! And it’s extra sexy if you encounter a popup notification!

Shout-out to Stephen, Frank, and Dão for working on this with me.