I'm not a fan of this proposal, favicon should match our logo in the top left, in the future we might use the favicon to indicate the user has messages. /cc @JobV
@sytses Note that we have already customized the logo in the top left, which is possible through the admin UI today :-) I think you could still do the messages trick with the favicon in the customized case?
(I don't feel that strongly about this, but at one point I replaced favicon with my own, and then when it changed after an upgrade a user filed a bug about it. I haven't bothered to replace it in quite some time, and have had no other comments.)
I think we're doing users of the GitLab instance a disservice by allowing the company to change the favicon to their own logo, as it makes it that much harder to identify what runs on a specific tab if the company has multiple on-premises or whitelabel apps with that favicon.
@DouweM As I mentioned before, this is not a big issue. None of my users have commented in months with the default GitLab favicon, and only one person ever commented on it at all. I can easily tell him it's not going to be "fixed".
I'm sorry but you missed an important point: people are using more than one Gitlab instance, and there's NO WAY to distinguish one from another, which frustrates people who come to ask "why don't you change the favicon". The answer is: we're using restrictive free software, eh?
I agree with @hellekin because we have this issue right now (i.e. several gitlab instances that can't be distinguished).
To come back to @DouweM's point, companies that have such a problem should be able to create favicon variations to help distinguish between various services (which I'm sure they already do).
I think you're doing users of Gitlab a disservice by not allowing to choose and have the freedom to find the best option that will work for them!
@jmatsushita All right, I can see the use case. Since we allow logos etc to be overridden already anyway, adding this is not a big leap.
GitLab is intended to be opinionated software, and if a configuration option is proposed that has a good default (in our eyes), we prefer to not add the option at all and just make the default the only behavior. In this case, adding the option makes sense to me though :)
Is this feature proposal still open to discussion? I would like this feature to be implemented. In my case I have multiple installations locally and also use gitlab.com and they all use the same favicon and honestly is pretty confusing to differentiate them. I ended up using this Chrome extension but it doesn't work well all the time.
I actually found this Issue because I was searching Google for instructions on how to change the favicon for my GitLab CE install. Just throwing in a couple more cents in favor of being able to differentiate between GitLab installs (and the main GitLab site) via custom favicons.
I like the option to just be able to pick a color scheme. This would allow GitLab to do notifications through the favicon without complicating the customize feature.
I'd like to go ahead and implement this, unless there's still some doubt about it... (/cc @JobV)
Alternatively, we offer a few colors of our own logo to choose from.
I'd like to go ahead and implement the fully customizable favicon version. I think this color-solution is more complicated and may not be sufficient for many users.
[...] reuse the "header logo" in /admin/appearance, and use that as a favicon as well?
I think this is not feasible in many cases, as automatically sizing down an arbitrary logo image may not give a proper result.
@koffeinfrei just wanted to pitch in with our use case too. Even though it would be sufficient for us to scale down the logo, I would also vote for separating logo and favicon settings. It is not too much of a hassle to set it once and this solution has a lot of flexibility with respect to a logo-scaling one.
Thank you @jk and @mcnesium for the icon replacement trick. We currently are replacing the favicon, gitlab_logo.png, apple images, etc and rebuilding the package. I would love to see at least the gitlab_logo.png also customizable, since this is what is seen when a URL is unfurled by Slack, Twitter, etc. I can open this as a separate issue too, but mentioning it here in case @koffeinfrei wants to kill two birds with one stone.
We'd really like this feature too. Just having something to differentiate our GitLab tabs from others would be great, as I constantly click the wrong tab. More and more third party software we use are moving to GitLab, since it rocks :) Our company logo is gray though, so just having a colorized GitLab logo would look a little drab, but might be OK.
I think what we'd do is to keep the GitLab logo favicon as it is, but superimpose our logo on it.
@DouweM I'd like to implement a solution where one file can be uploaded and all relevant images (favicon, apple touch, etc.) are generated from the main image. For this we'd need to have imagemagick/graphicsmagick installed. Is this an option? In https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/34364#note_33715422 you said:
but depends on imagemagick to do this, which is not something we want to include in GitLab's omnibus package.
Although later:
Shall we schedule automatically resizing avatars to sensible sizes using Carrierwave/MiniMagick/GraphicsMagick?
If not we could only allow uploading the favicon.ico file without postprocessing it and just showing that file, without touching the apple etc. icons. This would be a very limited solution though.
Another icon to be modified I just discovered is in the footer of notification mails. It's linked to a file of the instance which sent the notification, but it's still the default GitLab logo, i.e.:
My 2 cents : gitlab is now my core tool, with multiple instances (CE & EE) running simultaneously (one for each client).... this is just an screenshot of my chrome left tabs to prove that any customisation of favicon (color, custom, ...) is a serious need