On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 5:09 AM, Yuri Astrakhan <yastrakhan@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I was looking at the page sizes, and noticed that the wikipedia.ico file is 15KB, which is about 14% of the average m. page size.  Unfortunatelly, this download is not reported by either firefox or chrome dev tools due to know bugs, so it might have been overlooked in our site performance review.

Can we shrink it somehow?  Or is there a reason to keep it as is?

I tried shrinking it with GIMP to 4bit - and got a 5x reduction. There are some color changes, but I don't know much about images, so possibly some pixel hunting by a designer is needed. Also, I tried 4bit+PNG option, which might not be supported by every browser, especially some mobile ones, and it got me an extra 569 bytes (21%)

Lastly, do we really need 3 different sizes - 16,32,64? Can we do 16 & 64?

So I don't know if all three sizes are really required for this, but on both Android and iOS remember that users can and do save a bookmark to their home screens which links to the mobile site. The current version was definitely designed with that use case in mind. 

Munaf Assaf, who used to be a designer with us, is the one responsible for the most recent redesign that resulted in this look. He is still local and would probably be happy to explain the sizing choices and other parts, and maybe help work on any revisions as a volunteer. He's at munaf.assaf@gmail.com. 

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Steven Walling,
Product Manager