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Favicon

Posted November 30th, 2003 in Glossary (Updated February 24th, 2004)

Favicon is an abbreviation for "Favorite Icon" and is a small icon used to represent the website in a web browser's location bar and in its list of bookmarks (or favorites, as they are know in Internet Explorer).

When a web browser first comes to a new site, it checks its favicon cache to see if there is one for this site. If not, it will ask the web server for the file (called favicon.ico and stored in the web site's root directory). If one could not be served, the web browser will use its default icon instead. If you don't have a favicon for your site then you will get a lot of "file not found" errors in your website logs.

Favicons were first introduced in Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 5.0 and are now used in a variety of web browsers, including Konqueror, Galeon, Opera, Mozilla and Netscape Navigator. Not all web browsers support favicons in the same way; an example of this is Internet Explorer 6, which will not show the favicon in the location bar until you've bookmarked it and restarted your web browser - IE6 also does not save the favicon into the favorites list (at least not on my Windows machine, anyway).

If you are experimenting with favicons, they tend to get cached in browsers and won't reload when you refresh a page, and need to be manually deleted from the cache. An example of this is how to delete favicons in Konqueror.

Favicons typically are 16 x 16 pixels in size, and make use of just 16 colours. They can be created in variety of image software applications, including Adobe Photoshop and GoLive.