What is Favicon.ico? Personalise Your Sites Bookmark(zt)(1)

What is Favicon.ico? Personalise Your Site's Bookmark

link:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/favicon.shtml

Some time back, I had an email from a visitor asking me how I managed to have thefreecountry.com's icon displayed next to my URL in his browser's location bar. In fact, had he checked carefully, he would also have noticed that the icon is also used in his "Favorites" menu.

Internet EXPlorer ("IE") 5.0 and above has a facility where, if someone bookmarks your website (ie puts it in their "Favorites" menu), it associates a particular icon with your website in the bookmark. It tries to obtain that icon by first requesting for "favicon.ico" from the directory of your web page. If it cannot find sUCh a file, it will try to obtain it from the root directory of your website, failing which, it will simply use a default icon for the bookmark.

On the other hand, the favicon.ico file is available, the icon will also be displayed beside your website name in the "Favorites" menu, the location bar in IE, and if the user opens up the "Favorites" folder, it will be the icon used for the link to your site.

Mozilla, and probably also the new versions of Netscape (which are based on Mozilla), also have the ability to use the favicon.ico file, except that Mozilla also accepts the file in other graphiCS formats, such as the PNG format. It displays the "favicon.ico" in the location bar of the browser (the part that shows your website's URL). The latest version of Opera also loads the favicon.ico file into the address bar if available.

Software Requirements