Letters/symbols/emoji as icons

[Madis0]

In my opinion, the available icons and colors are very limited. The colors are being considered in #391, but the problem with icons is much harder to solve:

• Ask for more icons - takes time to do and the result may still be too few icons to satisfy users
• Let users choose an image file - a hard and messy option, would make compatible extensions complex too

So I was thinking - why not just use characters? There are many advantages:

• Could be as simple as F for Facebook and G for Google
• Could use emojis to create thousands of color-character combinations (or show the platform-specific SVG and extract it's color)
• Could just use a period, underscore, space etc. to keep it minimalistic and solve icon-free #771
• Could even remove the built-in icons and simply suggest some well-visible emojis to replace them
• Advanced users might not even need titles to know which icon represents which Container, especially Chinese 😁

What do you think?

[yashha]

Maybe add brand icons like fb and twitter, I have each in a different container
https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons

[grahamperrin]

I manually edited my containers.json file,

{"version":2,"lastUserContextId":31,"identities":[{"userContextId":5,"public":false,"icon":"","color":"","name":"userContextIdInternal.thumbnail","accessKey":""},{"userContextId":19,"public":true,"icon":"","color":"","name":"📱"},{"userContextId":31,"public":true,"icon":"","color":"","name":"🍋"}]}

[jonathanKingston]

I manually edited my containers.json file,

This is a bad idea, the APIs from memory don't handle this well.

[somoso]

What about using FontAwesome icons, as well as similar font icon packs for the icons?

[grahamperrin]

… a bad idea, …

Yeah, sorry. I forgot to add that I restart Firefox after edition, and so on …

[groovecoder]

This would need a platform-level patch; would need to file a bug in bugzilla.

[Madis0]

Forgot to make a Bugzilla bug, but now here it is!

[Paarmita]

@Madis0 @groovecoder @jonathanKingston @yashha I want to work on this issue. Can I add these mentioned icons or some more review is needed?

[Madis0]

@Paarmita I suggested characters instead of specific icons, you may have wanted to tag someone else.