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What is Favicon.ico? Personalise Your Sites Bookmark(zt)(4) However, this side effect is no longer relevant today. Mozilla, Netscape and Opera load the favicon.ico to display in your visitors' location bar whether they put your site in their favourites (or bookmarks) or not. Apparently the Mac OS X browser, Safari, also loads the favicon.ico file whenever it visits a site (it uses it in the history menu). I've not checked the latest version of IE so I'm not sure if it does the same too. I merely mention this "side-effect" so that you won't deceive yourself when you see the large number of "favicon.ico" requests in your web logs: it doesn't tell you that those your visitors bookmarked your site anymore. Miscellaneous MattersIf you are testing your favicon file in Internet Explorer, and find that you're seeing an old version of your favicon.ico file, you probably need to empty your browser's cache (and possible restart the browser). Internet Explorer caches the favicon.ico file in the "Temporary Internet Files" folder, so if you don't empty the cache, you'll probably continue to see your old version and not the new version that you've created. Incidentally, this also means that if your visitors empty their cache, their copy of the favicon.ico file that was associated with the bookmark of your site will also be lost. ConclusionThe "favicon.ico" facility is by no means essential to your website's operation. In fact, few people even notice its existence, and its really too small to put anything useful in it. However, creating one can save your site some bandwidth if you have created a custom 404 File Not Found error file - that file will be sent by your web server everytime there is a request for a nonexistent "favicon.ico" file. Perhaps more importantly, creating such an icon adds to the professionalism of your site, marking you as a web designer who attends to detail.
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