Should budgets include requests to favicons?

[connorjclark]

Because they currently do.

I think it'd make sense to exclude favicons from our budget calculations. Has this been discussed?

Note, favicons are not supported in LR, so there is a discrepancy there.

[patrickhulce]

seems like this should be taken up with the budget folks rather than here ;)

we reuse the definitions over in https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/blob/master/lighthouse-core/computed/resource-summary.js#L38-L67 so whatever gets set there will be picked up here 👍

[connorjclark]

I did not mean to file this in ci :)

[connorjclark]

@khempenius what are your thoughts on this?

[khempenius]

IMO they should. Although they're tiny, the page still had to load them.

[connorjclark]

AFIU the request for the favicon doesn't block the renderer in any way, and the browser caches it pretty well for navigations within the same frame, so it only gets requested once.

Those are somewhat-decent justifications IMO, but the real issue I'm thinking of is the constraint in PSI/web.dev where we don't see favicon requests, so budget results differ with other channels.

[khempenius]

Ah, in which case I'd probably be in favor of not including them in budgets. From the sounds of it, PSI/web.dev not seeing favicons is a pretty concrete constraint and/or a pain to fix, in which case, I think it's more important that all LH versions generate consistent results, than it is that favicons get counted towards budgets.

[haideralipunjabi]

I see that the budget is ignoring the .ico version of favicon. Is there a reason for it to include the .png format ones?

[patrickhulce]

A reason is that favicon.ico is requested whether the page wanted it to happen or not whereas favicon.png should only happen when explicitly referenced from the page. I'm not sure that's a great reason, but it makes sure users who don't serve a favicon aren't being punished in budgets for Chrome-behavior.

I'm not sure if headless will request any <link rel="icon"> declaration though, I'd assume it doesn't. If so, our original rationale would suggest ignoring them even if it's much more problematic (could now be named anything, requires LinkElements to be able to filter out, etc)

[connorjclark]

Just checking .ico was an oversight.

[connorjclark]

we got rid of budgets #15950