FAVICON.ICO is a web page
icon. Favicon.com is a service creating favicons.
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A
favicon
- Favicon.ico - (short for 'favorites
icon'), also known as a website icon, page icon or urlicon, is an icon
associated with a particular website or webpage. Favicon.com
A web designer can create such icons in
several ways, and many recent web browsers can then make use of them.
Browsers that support them 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 web server. 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 <head> 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 PNG and animated GIF 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.
This may annoy web server administrators by creating many server log
entries, and unnecessarily loading the disk, CPU, and network. Another
common problem is that the favicons may disappear if the browser's cache is
emptied.
Originally, Internet Explorer only used favicons for bookmarks (for instance
MSIE 6.0), 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 (e.g. 7.0) and most other browsers also
display the favicon in the address bar on every visit, this is becoming less
of an issue.
This "favicon.ico" used to have an
interesting side-effect. The side-effect applied whether or not you bothered
to put a special "favicon.ico" on your site. You used to be able to find out
the number of IE 5 users who bookmarked your site by simply counting the
requests for "favicon.ico" in your web server logs, since IE 5 only asked
for the favicon.ico file when a site was placed into the "Favorites" menu.
From the number of favicon.ico requests, you could estimate the total
number of people who bookmark your site by applying this formula: number of
IE 5 bookmarks divided by the fraction of your visitors using IE 5.
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