Add favicon and page title preview for naked URLs

Question

Jira has a nice feature which shows the icon (favicon), title, and meta thumbnail of the page (if available) that the link or URL is pointing to.

A real example issue in Jira containing many links: https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/CLDR-18863

Please implement extracting the <link rel="shortcut icon" and <title>...</title> of the page next to the link/URL in Stack Overflow. No previews like Wikipedia. Just the icon and the title.

Or, at least, show the Stack Overflow logo next to links pointing to other Stack Overflow posts.

Related issues:

"As a side note" That should be a different question, as it's completely unrelated to feature request you're making. — Thom A, Commented Aug 22 at 11:27
I think this would be quite useful for also spotting spam. Some spammers decide to link punctuation or a random word to a site. And seeing the icon next to the link will make these spam attempts harder to get past other users. Though, it maybe opens up options for spammers to re-use an existing favicon (e.g., the Wikipedia one) to try and push a link as legitimate. — VLAZ, Commented Aug 22 at 12:40
Showing those previews imply making an actual request to those URLs, I don't think it really makes sense to do so. If done client side users would get opened up to potential attack vectors, if done server side Stack Overflow then needs to make a bunch of requests to random URLs (Which raises concerns on their side as well). In general it doesn't seem worth it to implement this given all the troubles it brings. — Abdul Aziz Barkat, Commented Aug 22 at 14:38
The UI of StackOverflow is lacking and stuck in what GenX/GenY in their teens could imagine as "good". With modern design icons and nice style for links would be awesome. But otherwise I am against changing just the links in the current design. — Sinatr, Commented Aug 22 at 14:39
For SO to add trackers automatically and implicitly to whatever web links an author includes seems like a bad idea. Would this also be a "feature" that users can opt out (or even better, never opt in)? — Nanigashi, Commented Aug 22 at 17:28

Karl Knechtel · Accepted Answer · 2025-08-23 19:16:40Z

I think there is the core of a good idea here. Such link decoration provides useful information; as noted in comments by VLAZ, this mean that every link gets an explicit decoration, which would help with noticing hidden links sometimes placed by spammers (e.g. linking just a single period to the spam domain).

However, as also noted in that comment, as well as Abdul Aziz Barkat, fetching and showing the icon of an arbitrary site entails automatically visiting that domain, which could represent a security risk. There's also nothing stopping malicious domain owners from plagiarizing the icon of a legitimate site.

To make functionality like this work, there should be a whitelist of sites whose icon will be shown, and cached icons for those sites; and a generic "unknown domain" icon should be shown for other links.

As for the title of the linked page, I don't think this is useful — in legitimate use cases, it wouldn't give useful information beyond the user's chosen link text.

2 revs · Accepted Answer · 2025-08-23 00:46:50Z

3

You can do this for popular sites yourself, using JS and/or CSS:

.post-layout a[href^="https://stackoverflow.com/q"]::before {
    --size: 18px;
    
    content: '';
    display: inline-block;
    margin: 0 2px 0 0;
    height: var(--size);
    width: var(--size);
    vertical-align: middle;
    background-image: url(https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/stackoverflow/Img/favicon.ico);
    background-size: var(--size) var(--size);
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

edited Aug 23 at 0:46

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2 revs
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Add favicon and page title preview for naked URLs

Or, at least, show the Stack Overflow logo next to links pointing to other Stack Overflow posts.

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