RealFaviconGenerator/realfavicongenerator

Windows 10 / Edge "Pin to taskbar" feature - Icons are altered by the OS if they don't have enough contrast with the taskbar

Opened this issue · 2 comments

I just spent the better part of two days figuring out why my icon was getting this janky "white border" when pinned to the Windows 10 taskbar via Edge:

w10-taskbar-icon-contrast

Turns out that, if your icon has insufficient contrast with the taskbar, the OS will "pad" the icon, and give it a very light grey background, to try and improve the contrast. It does not affect native apps, only ones pinned via Edge. It will also happen if you have a "high contrast" theme enabled in Windows.

Now that I've all but destroyed my sanity figuring this out, I'm wondering if it's something that RFG could/should warn you about. At least when using the web interface, there could theoretically be a preview that shows what the icon might look like in the Windows 10 taskbar.

Wow :( Same here:

image

Thanks for reporting.

Edge is using the Apple Touch icon. So the user should be warned when he designs the icon for iOS. This would be weird in terms of UX.

Another issue is to reverse engineer what Edge considers as low contrast. Unless a "Beware of the contract" generic notice is deemed good enough, but I'm not fond of this.

Finally, Edge (probably) takes the current task bar background color into account (I didn't check this). This makes creating a one-color-fits-all icon impossible. Sure, the default, dark background is probably a good reference.

In the end I'm not sure of how this should be handled.

As an aside, for debugging purposes the compatibility test might have been helpful. By running it you can find out which icon is picked in a case or another (the touch icon in that case).

@phbernard In my testing I discovered that it's actually really hard to get Windows to use a "light" color task bar.

Registry hacks and third party apps aside, the only supported way is to use the "high contrast white" accessibility setting, and even then, Windows will still use the light colored border/background. It really seems like they just assume your task bar is always dark, crazy as that is!

In theory, that makes the choice here simpler; don't use a "dark" Apple touch icon unless you want Edge to mess with it!

Anyway, thanks for checking the issue out, I appreciate it :)