Proposal to Disable Unwanted Bang Requests

[J-source-1]

This is an excellent next-level browser, it has no competitors. But the only issue that bothers me is the requests for icons when entering a query. This thing is triggered by bangs. It would be good if there was an option to disable their loading. Personally, I don't like unnecessary requests, especially for a browser focused on privacy. Many users probably don't know that when entering their query, they trigger dozens of connections to various services (including services to which this is undesirable) as they type.

Thank you for your work!

[arianr04]

Some option to completely turn off bangs whilst keeping the default search engine would also good both for UI and privacy

[jaxiiruff]

I've always hated this. They arent even relevant most of the time and break the search/url flow. The pinging is not privacy respecting but also just wasteful for network bandwidth to spam requests.

[FaFre]

I really liked the idea of shipping the bangs with prefetched icons. Unfortunately this seems to be problematic with copyright law in the EU the last time I checked (which is already a while ago). However the icons will get cached, so the request you are seeing should just happen once for a long time.

Any ideas?

[J-source-1]

I really liked the idea of shipping the bangs with prefetched icons. Unfortunately this seems to be problematic with copyright law in the EU the last time I checked (which is already a while ago). However the icons will get cached, so the request you are seeing should just happen once for a long time.

Any ideas?

I can't help with legal information, perhaps a simple illustration falls under Fair Use, but who knows. I've seen other programs use nextdns.io and duckduckgo.com to fetch site icons (the mobile firewall RethinkDNS does this, to display icons in the DNS requests section at the user's discretion). This is better than dozens of requests to various servers as you type (even if they're cached). Perhaps the best option would be to add a function to disable icon loading at the user's preference. That way, you could use the benefits of bangs while also being able to disable unwanted requests. Currently, you can't even disable the bangs.