How RFG's favicons are tested

RealFaviconGenerator is not a mere claim, a promise that all these icons will (probably) find they way in the tabs, bookmarks and home screens or your visitors. The generated code and icons are actually tested before being released.

The compatibility test

RealFaviconGenerator quality starts with the favicon compatibility test. This is a three-forms process that allows anyone to test the generic package created by RFG on his own device(s). The test exposes your browser to two scenarios:

Favicons files are in the root directory of the web site
Favicon files are in a sub-directory

Basically, you visit a random site which is equipped with RFG's code, do a few operations (add to bookmark, add to home screen...) and note the results. When it's done, I get an email.

Different pics

It's not enough to check that the tested browser displays an icon. We must find out which icon is displayed. Does Windows Firefox takes a PNG icon declared with a link tag or one of the embedded icons of favicon.ico? Does Android Chrome really takes the icons declared in the Web App manifest or an Apple Touch icon? To be certain, the compatibility test comes with different icons, so you can quickly see which one is chosen.

Which icon does Windows Chrome use?

Apparently, the 32x32 PNG icon

A dedicated domain name

If you play with favicons, you know how browsers can be stubborn regarding caching. Once they load your favicon for the first time, they won't reload it before a while. So annoying. For this reasons, the compatibility test is always mounted on a particular domain name, so that each test is run in isolation. At the time of writing, the first test is located on test01-v0-13-attempt-5.test.realfavicongenerator.net. As the name says, we are testing the upcoming package v0.13, and this is the 5th attempt.

Running the tests

Tests are run by generous contributors. Simply visit the compatibility test and take the two-minutes tour. When a release is incoming, a little tweet usually ask for help.

Would you help testing the next version? We need non cutting edge devices such as iPhone 4, first generation iPad... https://t.co/2Oti6bkkdA
— RealFaviconGenerator (@RealFavicon) 29 juin 2016

Before a release, there is always a special trip to an Apple Store in order to fill the empty cells.

"Hello Sir, So you are interested in iPads?" "Leave me alone, I'm in the middle of my favicon tests"

Results

The compatibility of the current version is available, so you know what you can expect from a set of icons got from RFG.

And yep, next package should be released in a couple of days.