
Inventing Favicon.ico - ray_sun
http://ruthlessray.wordpress.com/
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will_brown
Really cool reading this back story, in 2010 I launched a web search engine
that displayed search results as favicons (no text, image only). The goal was
to appeal to kids (using images and not text) and mobile devices (I generally
find only 3 search results fit on a mobile screen using standard search
engines, but the favicon engine allowed a user to see 30 search results on the
screen at once)...the traction did not last and it was shut down.
Nevertheless, great learning experience and my fondness of favicons and their
importance only grew.

Edit: The part about Yahoo also made me recall a prior version on Yahoo's
mobile search which displayed favicons prominently to the left of the search
result text (first thing your eyes saw was the favicon), and at the time I
felt Yahoo had the most aesthetically pleasing results page of all the search
engines on mobile, all because the addition of the favicons.

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zorked
DuckDuckGo uses favicons in the way you described:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=favicon](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=favicon)

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Killswitch
Nice article. I love how some of the most widely used stuff now days is just
something random that some developer at the time thought up whimsically.

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vxNsr
yeah, I have no idea what our bookmarks bars would look like without favicons,
especially if you used firefox's extension that shows just the favicon (which
was one of the reasons I held onto firefox for so long).

There's a video somewhere of Mark Zuckerberg and some co-workers discussing
ideas about Facebook (in it's earliest days), and in the video they are trying
to decide on what options should be available under the relationship field,
one guy says something like: "I feel like we should make it possible to say
that.. like you're not in a relationship per se, but nor are you free, like
it's complicated..."

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kuyan
Permalink: [http://ruthlessray.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/inventing-
favico...](http://ruthlessray.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/inventing-favicon-ico/)

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dspillett
_> noticed an unusual spike in HTTP requests for /favicon.ico_

I remember a guy at Uni reacting to this in a fit of anti-MS pique ("How DARE
they go making useless non-standard requests to my server behind my viewers'
backs!!!!!!!") and putting a large meaningless file there for IE to find. It
didn't take him long to work out he was only hurting himself...

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MichaelApproved
Reminds me about the story of <blink>

TLDR - guys were drinking and kicked around the idea of the blink tag. One of
them left late that night to implement the tag overnight.

[http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag](http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag)
HN discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3865141](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3865141)

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improv32
Why does this link to the blog and not the article referenced in the title?

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msoad
I thought favicon is W3C standard. It's not standardized yet! I can't find any
specs for it!

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pilif
You're supposed to be using a <link> tag. See
[http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/links.html#rel-icon)

This has some advantages over just blindly loading one file (no HTTP request
if there's no image, though browsers still all try /favicon.ico nowadays) and
you get to chose where to place the icon (probably together with other images
of your site).

I think by now all browsers support <link rel="shortcut icon"> but all of them
still request /favicon.ico so by adding that you a) don't have to change your
markup for the icon and b) you silence the error log of your web server - all
in one go.

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masklinn
> This has some advantages over just blindly loading one file (no HTTP request
> if there's no image, though browsers still all try /favicon.ico nowadays)
> and you get to chose where to place the icon (probably together with other
> images of your site).

Also, browsers which aren't MSIE can use PNG, GIF (including animated) or JPEG
favicons.

> I think by now all browsers support <link rel="shortcut icon">

Only rel=icon is necessary in most browser, rel="shortcut icon" is for MSIE
lte 9.

> but all of them still request /favicon.ico

(if no icon is specified)

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fiorix
Amazing

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pedromorgan
having read it..

You need to get a life and realise how much pain and suffering you have caused
us all non m$ users.

To this day its a pain.. even a png auto would suffice..

What would be your plan NOW ? For everyones sanity . check

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kevingadd
ICO's a perfectly reasonable format for small icons, and PNG was still a new
format then.

I've written stuff that handled the ICO format; it's simpler and easier to
load than PNG/GIF/JPG (unless you already have libraries for the latter, of
course - which wasn't a given in browsers at the time). I don't think their
choice was wrong at all, especially since ICO loading was at the time built
into the OS, so any Windows browser that wanted to load favicons didn't even
have to build their own loader.

EDIT: Plus, if you're complaining about 'favicon.ico', it's no worse than
robots.txt. At the time the modern 'link rel="icon"' approach was definitely
not in common use so it's no wonder nobody at MS chose it, and people probably
would have complained loudly about MS introducing 'some proprietary icon
HTML'.

Another reason ICO is good as a favicon format is that it makes it impossible
for site authors to accidentally use a 500KB image file as their icon (which
you could trivially do with png, gif, jpg, etc.) - ICO is intentionally a file
format for small images, tailor-made for what icons were like in that era. So
by relying on ICO they ensured that the favicon.ico on each site would be
small, cheap to download, easy to cache, and easy to author.

~~~
masklinn
And ICO has the huge advantage that you can provide multiple bitmap sizes (and
color depths) in a single file, avoiding the bullshit of having to specify 6
different icons for 6 different size specs.

Technically, ICO is really a container more than an image format, the original
ICO just contained bitmap data, since Vista you can also put PNG data in your
ICO file (which MSIE recommends for 256x256 icons).

A similar alternative being Apple's (somewhat more flexible) ICNS

