How to create a discarded tab with favicon loaded?

Add-ons Development
1

Creating a tab via

await browser.tabs.create({ url: 'https://www.example.com/', discarded: true });

yields a discarded tab that’s missing its title (not an issue) and its favicon (my issue).

I’ve thought of one way to solve this: create a regular non-discarded, non-active tab, and then have tabs.onUpdated listen for a non-null favIconUrl property change to trigger a tabs.discard() on it (and then remove the listener). I’ve yet to try it.

Are there better ways to do this? Something from the webRequest API? Guidance appreciated.

3

Creating brand new tabs, possibly many at once. I’m concerned whether your method, which adds an onUpdated listener per tab, is efficient. Given a list of tabs to create, would it be better to have one listener for them all?

Edit: Context for future readers: I was replying to a user that replied to me, which I suspected was AI and has been removed (as well as all its posts) likely because it was AI. It never did reply to my follow-up question.

4

Firefox has also an issue where API discarded tabs don’t get “discarded-look” for their favicons:

Although I can’t say if that’s actually desirable for you, right?

If you think there is a good potential for a new WebExtension API, you suggest it here:

Now that I think about it, we already have tabs.update() API, so this would require only adding new field support:

5

I commented on it 7 years ago with the same ask. :slight_smile:

6

Thanks for the link!
I’ve just poked it, maybe it will yield some results… :slight_smile: .

But I think this would be better discussed here: Issues · w3c/webextensions · GitHub
Maybe some experts would come up with some better solution.
And if everyone agrees there, it puts more pressure on the vendors to actually implement it :smiley: .