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A favicon (short for "favorites icon"), also known as a page icon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon, and many graphical web browsers—such as recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, iCab, AOL Explorer, and Konqueror—can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser's URL bar, next to the site's name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page's title in a tabbed document interface.

The original means of defining a favicon was by placing a file called favicon.ico in the root directory of a webserver. This would then automatically be used in Internet Explorer's favorites (bookmarks) display. Later, however, a more flexible system was created, using HTML to indicate the location of an icon for any given page. This is achieved by adding two link elements in the section of the document as detailed below. In this way, any appropriately sized (16×16 pixels or larger) image can be used, and although many still use the .ico format, other browsers now also support the animated GIF and PNG image formats.

Most modern browsers implement both methods. Because of this, web servers receive many requests for the file "favicon.ico" even if it doesn't exist. Another common problem is that the favicons may disappear if the browser's cache is emptied.

Originally, Internet Explorer only used favicons for bookmarks, which created a minor privacy concern in that a site owner could tell how many people had bookmarked their site by checking the access logs to see how many people downloaded the favicon.ico file. However, since newer versions of Internet Explorer and most other browsers also display the favicon in the address bar on every visit, that concern may no longer be relevant (current use of Internet Explorer version 6 on Windows XP only uses the favicon for bookmarked pages).

Guidelines

For optimal browser support, the following rules should be obeyed:
  • Include both of these element types (for reasons explained below under Standardization):
  • The link elements must be inside the head element (between and ) in the HTML.
  • For XHTML, the link element must be empty (terminated by /> )
  • The href can, but need not, point to the location /favicon.ico. It could equally well point anywhere else on your site that is convenient.
  • The image can usually be in any image format supported by the web browser, the major exception is IE, which only supports ICO although it appears IE7 may support alternative formats.
  • The .ico file format will be read correctly by most browsers.
  • Configure the webserver to send the correct MIME identifier:
    • ICO files image/x-icon (the IANA-registered MIME type of image/vnd.microsoft.icon is not recognized by major browsers)
    • GIF files image/gif
    • PNG files image/png
  • Use the appropriate resolution and colordepth.
    • ICO: include multiple resolutions (most commonly used being 16×16 and 32×32, with 64×64 and 128×128 sometimes used by Mac OS X) and bit-depths (most common being 4, 8, 24 bpp - i.e. 16, 256 and 16 million colours) in the file.
    • GIF: use 16×16 in 256 colors.
    • PNG: use 16×16 in either 256 colors or 24-bit.

Note: A file called favicon.ico and located in the document root directory will also be found by some browsers which do not process the link elements, even if it is not linked from anywhere on your site.

Standardization

The original favicon feature was created by Microsoft, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser would request a favicon from a set URL (/favicon.ico) on every website. Microsoft's supported format for the link tag did not conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML recommendation because:
  • The rel attribute must contain a space-delimited list of link types, so a two-word link type would not be understood correctly by conforming web browsers.
  • The ".ico" file format (a raster format used for icons on Microsoft Windows) did not have a registered MIME type, and wasn't likely to be automatically understood by most web browsers. In 2003, however, the format was registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) under the MIME type image/vnd.microsoft.icon, eliminating the first part of this problem.
  • The use of a reserved location on a website conflicts with the Architecture of the World Wide Web, and is known as link squatting or URI squatting.

The Mozilla web browser added support for favicons, in a way that conformed to web standards: the use of rel="icon" and let web designers add favicons in any supported graphics format. e.g. . Most web browsers have since added support for this feature, which should be used for all new content.

See also

  • The favatar is a proposal for using favicons as user avatars in weblog comments. It is a decentralized alternative to gravatars.
  • List of free icon resources maintained at Icons

External links

Computer graphics | World Wide Web

Favicon | Favicon | فاویکون | Favicon | Icone incastrate | Favicon | Favicon | Favicon | Favicon | Favicon

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Favicon".

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