Browser.chrome.image icons.max size

From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is browser.chrome.image_icons.max_size.

This article describes the preference browser.chrome.image_icons.max_size. To add, delete, or modify this preference, you will need to edit your configuration — do not edit this article.

1 Background
2 Possible values and their effects
3 Caveats
4 Recommended settings
5 First checked in
6 Has an effect in
7 Related bugs
8 Related preferences

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Background

To help users differentiate between images loaded in tabs, Firefox sets the tab icon (and the icon in the Location Bar) to a small version of the image. Early tests of this feature revealed performance problems; to address this, Firefox only shows the image’s thumbnail in the tab and Location Bar if the image is smaller than a certain size. This preference determines the cutoff.

This preference may become obsolete in the future if bug 305986 is fixed. (This bug is fixed in SeaMonkey since 2008-09-25. The fix may or may not have been ported to Firefox.)

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Possible values and their effects

This preference takes a positive integer. If an image’s width or height is greater than this number, the default icon is displayed instead of a thumbnail. The default value is 1024. Setting it to 0 will disable image thumbnails.

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Caveats

Setting this value too high can result in poor performance (i.e., choppiness, poor UI responsiveness, memory leaks, etc.)
browser.chrome.site_icons must be set to true for this preference to have an effect.

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Recommended settings

The default value should be a good compromise between performance and usability. If you experience slowness when viewing images less than 1024 pixels high or wide, however, you may want to decrease the value of this preference (or set it to 0).

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