Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Discussions for the Apple Mac OS builds of Pale Moon

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The old Mac OS versions of Pale Moon were provided by various people and not official or in any way organized. Please make sure you check the date of topic threads to know if the topic is current or relevant! We are using this board for both old discussions and new development of Pale Moon on Mac.

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grasor

Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by grasor » 2020-12-06, 21:26

First, my OS specifics - 10.13.6, High Sierra, fully updated.

Second, a short statement of my issue.

I have been experimenting with Pale Moon under Mac OS, and surprisingly, almost everything works without any issues. Kudos to the independent developers working to make Pale Moon a reality on Mac OS under Intel.

I have "ported" my profile from Windows 7/10, and all extensions worked as expected.

The only problem that I have encountered is that the default bookmark icons are rendering as folders, rather than as the typical black & white "globe" favicon.

Sites with favicons retrieved from their root render correctly.

I tried restoring the bookmarks backup json file, and the bookmarks still show folders rather than the typical black & white "globe" favicon.

Where is the default favicon for bookmarks "without" a site favicon.ico obtained? Is that icon hard coded, or is it in a default resource?

Is there a coded database of the favicons stored somewhere in the profile folder?

Are the favicons encoded in the json file containing the bookmarks backup?

This issue is only happening on Mac OS, not under Windows.

I searched for legacy extensions that might allow manipulation of the bookmark favicon, but none of them work anymore under Pale Moon 28.x

Any help is troubleshooting this issue is greatly appreciated.

New Tobin Paradigm

Re: Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2020-12-06, 21:57

Your profile is corrupt.

grasor

Re: Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by grasor » 2020-12-06, 22:03

Answering one of my own questions...

In the profile folder there is a database named places.sqlite

Upon inspection, it has a table moz_favicons that includes the fields id, url, data (a BLOB), mime_type, expiration, and guid

I have confirmed this table is where the favicons are stored that render in the bookmark list.

The BLOB contains the coded favicon of the type indicated by the mime_type.

The only sites listed in this table are those containing customized favicons retrieved from each specific site.

However, I can't seem to find where the default favicon for sites not presenting a customized favicon is either stored or retrieved for rendering in the bookmark list.

Thanks again for any help.

grasor

Re: Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by grasor » 2020-12-06, 22:05

Thanks for the prompt response. My next step is to perform a clean rebuild of the profile.

Not being familiar with the code underlying the project, I am poking around reverse engineering logical elements in the profile.

grasor

Re: Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by grasor » 2020-12-06, 23:09

I performed a complete clean install of Pale Moon, with no extensions, and created two bookmarks for sites that have no favicons.

The result is the bookmarks, when placed inside a folder, appear with a folder icon rather than the default site icon.

If you place the same bookmarks in the root of a system default folder, e.g., Bookmarks Menu, they appear without any default icon, as text only based on the site name.

I will try this exercise again on another Mac with a clean install of the OS (I have VMs for testing) and report back.

This is perplexing...

grasor

Re: Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by grasor » 2020-12-07, 02:56

Final analysis.

I performed 4 clean installs of Pale Moon on 2 different iMacs running fully updated "clean" versions of High Sierra.

I tried both versions 28.15.0 and 28.16.0 of Pale Moon for Mac OS.

No third party extensions were installed.

No bookmarks were imported.

Bookmarks for web sites lacking favicons appear as text only, with no default icon, in the default root menus (Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmarks Menu).

Bookmarks for web sites lacking favicons placed inside user folders appear with a default folder icon and the text name of the bookmark.

Bookmarks for web sites including favicons appear as the imported favicon and the text name of the bookmark, regardless of where the bookmark is stored.

This behavior is not related to any type of profile corruption as suggested previously.

Can anyone having significant familiarity with the build and source code tell me where Pale Moon gets the resource used to generate the default menu icon for bookmarks that have no related favicon?

New Tobin Paradigm

Re: Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2020-12-07, 04:03

New Tobin Paradigm wrote:
2020-12-06, 21:57
Your profile is corrupt.

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Re: Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by Moonchild » 2020-12-07, 10:53

If you performed clean installs not copying or importing everything, then it may simply be a missing resource in the Mac theme, that might get filled with a different (cached) image if unable to get the proper resource.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

grasor

Re: Pale Moon 28.x rendering default bookmark iocns as folders

Unread post by grasor » 2020-12-07, 14:14

New Tobin Paradigm - the profile is not corrupt.

In performing clean installs, all information relating in any way to Pale Moon, and any other browser except for Safari, was not present.

I have baseline images of 10.13.6 that contain ONLY the essential components of that version of Mac OS.

Thus, the profile is being created by Pale Moon from scratch. Unless Pale Moon is self-corrupting its own profile, that is not the problem.

My experiments were performed on two statistically independent computers, with separate but equally sufficient instantiations of Mac OS 10.13.6.

I may try again today on Mojave or Catalina, but I prefer High Sierra as a more functional version of Mac OS.

Per Moonchild's response, that may be correct and is likely on point.

I need to determine exactly where the code base pulls the default icon from when rendering the bookmark list shown when selecting a menu.

I initially posted a request here assuming that I would immediately find one of the Mac savvy developers who knew the precise answer to my question.

Anyways, I have started writing an extension that will allow a Pale Moon user to select any favicon they want and set it on a per site, or global basis.

There are several legacy extensions available in the Classic Add-Ons Archive such as Bookmark Favicon Changer (v2.29) and IdentFavIcon (v0.3.4.7.1-signed) that have somewhat limited functionality under Pale Moon on Mac OS. I have both of them working, but should require neither if the current build was rendering the correct default icon in the first place.

I completely understand Moonchild's caveats concerning "unsupported" versions of Pale Moon, particularly based on the semi-proprietary BSD UNIX implementation used by Apple as Mac OS. Although Apple has created quite a robust, full featured toolset (xcode) for their software enabler platform, in many cases it is poorly documented. As a result, much of the code being released by Apple and innocent third party developers suffers from defects stemming from Apple's extremely poor quality control.

Having been an Apple developer since 1980, I can speak with authority on the matter of declining quality in both Apple's hardware and software products. Microsoft does a much better job creating software solutions that "just work."

OK, I'm off my soap box now.

I appreciate any help I can get on this matter, and will likely retrieve the latest source code posted by dbsoft, and begin searching for the section that draws the drop down menu and renders the favicons.

Thank you for your responses.

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