Appearance
The browser tab, the icon, what a link looks like when somebody pastes it, and adding it to a phone's home screen.
Settings › Appearance. The details everybody notices only when they are wrong, and nobody remembers to ask for.
What is here#
| Name and description | The browser tab, and what a search engine shows |
| Icon | The favicon, and the icon if it is installed to a phone |
| Link preview | The title, description and picture when somebody pastes the address into a message |
| Home screen | Whether it can be installed to a phone, and how it behaves when it is |
Why these are settings and not requests#
Three reasons, and they are the same three that put redirects and search-engine rules here too:
- Nobody asks for them. A tab that says
localhost, a link that unfurls in Slack as a bare URL with no picture, a home-screen icon that is a blank page — these are noticed when wrong and never specified when right. - The next build would overwrite them. Written into the source, a page title is a thing somebody has to undo.
- They take effect without a build. Change one and it applies on the next deployment. No build spent, nothing to review.
The builder is told which of these are handled here, so it does not write a competing page title into the code. Two of those take turns winning, which looks like a bug nobody can reproduce.
Icons and share pictures#
Picked from your published files rather than uploaded a second time. Upload the picture in Files, then choose it here.
They travel to the application as /_files/… paths rather than absolute URLs,
so the same value is right on the platform address, on your own domain, and in
both environments.