Any service that stores/indexes information linked to a domain could use this to increase the recognition factor for the customer when listing a set of domains.

A great example is 1Password, when you type in the url of an account, it fetches the favicon and displays it when listing your accounts, making is very easy to quickly scroll and recognize what you want.

Yet it feels like this is something you could just build a library for in your web app. I'm sure there are favicon pullers/cachers for every language out there. I know tt-rss has one for it's RSS job.

It seems like something silly to depend on an external service for.

My mind went to password managers too - something like tis would be great for KeePass/MacPass because its favicon grabber is hit or miss

I'm thinking one use case would be embedding in a web app. For example, a chat room or forum that "unfurls" links to show a preview (a'la Slack or Discourse) could benefit from showing a high resolution Favicon, e.g. if the linked page didn't have any other meta tags indicating a favored preview image.

Online RSS clients, perhaps? I admit I am having a hard time thinking of examples too.

Generally speaking, favicons are a great way to give links a small, yet unique visual represenation, making them easier identifiable.

In addition to the other use cases already mentioned here, imagine an e-mail client such as GMail that - in lack of a photo of the sender - at least shows the sender’s company logo (which in many cases is the domain’s Favicon). In such scenarios Favicon Kit can serve as a fallback for services like Gravatar.

I don't get it either. I'm only reading the comments because I'm personally interested in any progress towards eliminating favicons

Would you mind sharing why you want progress toward eliminating favicons? Do you think there is some other replacement, or that nothing at all should be used?

For me, I know having small icons helps me scroll through my bookmarks and identify resources I want to reference. Even if the shape of the icon is poor at a small resolution, I think my brain picks up on the color association. So just for the sake of finding things in my bookmarks, I can't imagine getting rid of favicons.

I hate them because they are requested automatically, rather than because the developer declared them. They clog my web server logs when I build microservices and in development they double up every page request. I still remember when they first started happening and they just broke the mental model that web pages were built on. From my software aesthetic perspective they disgust me.

Having an icon for bookmarks and tabs is totally, 100% great - don't get me wrong. but they should be off by default.

Think any shopping site that pulls in, or links to any products available for purchase online.