Hello ,
I was using Keepass 2.3.6 (and 2.3.7) with previous version of KeePassRPC Plugin and by creating news Passwords on Websites (Firefox 63) the Kee Plugin was pulling Favicons automatically from the entered website. That was very fine.
But I have updated to Keepass 2.4.0 and RPC Plugin 1.8.0 and now the Favicons do not imported automatically from the entered website. In Firefox Addon Kee Settings this option is already activated
I know that on some sites the Favicon was not created automatically but I have tried it on the same sites, which was creating the Favicon correctly. But in new Version it does not work.
Can someone confirm this issue?
Thanks, regards
Thanks for raising this topic.
I can confirm that saving favicons is unreliable but I’m not sure all the details match your description exactly.
For starters, I haven’t tested this specific feature in KeePass 2.40, although it is highly unlikely that has introduced a bug relating to favicons. The selection of the favicon is done by the Kee browser addon rather than KeePass or KeePassRPC (they merely save whatever icon they are given by the addon).
There is an ongoing Firefox bug which Mozilla have shown no interest in fixing:
In Firefox 63, Mozilla made significant changes to the way they handle favicons and it is my hypothesis that any recent increase in the number of favicon saving failures would relate to this change:
In my own testing, I see the unreliability described in bug 1417721 but also notice similar problems with Chrome so unfortunately it doesn’t appear that favicon support is a feature that browser manufacturers take especially seriously.
There is a feature request to allow add-ons to access the favicon through a reliable mechanism but this has not yet been scheduled by Mozilla and I’ve seen no indication from Google that they would follow suit with Chrome:
There may be a solution that doesn’t rely upon browser manufacturers. It should be possible for Kee to access information about each web page and make a direct request to the web site in question in order to load the favicon.
However, doing this reliably is a complex piece of work and may even be too large to be included within the Kee addon. A related alternative could be the development of a new service hosted on the internet that Kee could request the favicon from.
In both of those approaches, there are privacy implications that would need to be considered so I strongly favour solutions supplied by the browser manufacturers and so would prefer to defer any work on this.
If the frequency of these problems has indeed increased with Firefox 63, that might force us towards one of the less-ideal solutions so I’ll keep an eye on this topic over the coming months.
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Hello,
thanks for your detailed feedback. On some sites it works fine but on some other onfortunately not. I’m also using the Favicon Downloader Plugin, which does not work for some sites (brings the download error)
I like your work and want to say thanks and thumbs up. I have send you a little paypal donation 2 weeks ago. (feelnrg).
Hope some day it will be fixed. Thanks and cheers
I have discovered that the intermittent favicon availability is due to an incompatibility between the web browser’s form submission API and the favicon reading API (the former requires that we use synchronous code and the latter is asynchronous). The workaround that I had in place for many years has become less effective as who-knows-what changed within the web browser internals but the fundamental desire to capture the favicon that is available at the time a form is submitted can not actually be reliably supported by browser extensions.
The new password saving interface in Kee 3.4+ will allow us to instead use the favicon that is visible when the entry is created or updated. This is less accurate than the approach we have employed for the past decade but there will be very few cases where the impact is noticeable and I think it is better than removing favicon support entirely.
I’ve implemented the change on a development version of the extension and will test it in more depth in the coming weeks before releasing the Kee 3.4 beta.