What on earth is Favicon.ico?

Something to do with bookmarks I heard!

[vibgyor79]

There is a thread in Google forums titled "Estimating Bookmarking frequency from log files" at [webmasterworld.com...]

Apparently, I can find out the percentage of visitors bookmarking my site. So where do I get favicon? Do I need to install it on my server? Does it require big brains to install it?

Did a quick search on google and found favicon.com. But it is giving a "page not displayed" message.

[Air]

Not too tough to do, but getting a decent looking icon may be harder than it looks.

This thread [webmasterworld.com] might be of help. There's lot's more, just use the search link at the top.

[chris_f]

All that is needed is for you to create a Favicon.ico file and put it in the root of the site. However, I don't know the size restrictions so hopefully someone else can answer this.

[Mikkel Svendsen]

You do not need the favicon.ico file to track bookmarks. The file is requested by IE from your server when bookmarks are done by users no matter if the file exsist or not. If it do not exsist you will still be able to see the hit in your logs (only as a 404 for the file) and anlyse it. Basically you just count the number of hits for favicon.ico for the time frame you are analysing and there you have it: number of bookmarks :)

[Macguru]

I like to have 'clean' error logfile.

A lot of people will put <LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="../folder/favicon.ico"> on every pages. This can get a bit complicated for structured sites, since you need to figure a different path for each folder.

This is why I put this pesky in every folder or sub folders. You never know wich page is going to be bookmarked.

[jdMorgan]

Netscape 7.0 has thrown a wrench into the gears as far as using favicon.ico to reliably count users bookmarking your site. From what I can tell in my logs, NN7.0 will request favicon.ico every time a browser tab containing that favicon receives focus (is brought to the front). I noticed this on one of my own sites, of course, and what I saw was many, many requests for favicon.ico as I browseed during the day, opening and closing tabs while leaving the tab with my site open but in the background. Every time all other tabs were closed, leaving my site tab showing, a request was issued for favicon.ico.

I also noticed that NN7.0 requests favicon.ico regardless of whether you have specified a custon name for the icon file using <LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF=".../folder/custom_name.ico">. I ended up using .htaccess to silently redirect any requests for "favicon.ico" in any directory to "mydomain.tld/my_icon.ico" (in root) to give it the proper icon (and also to solve the problem that macguru describes above).

Bottom line: Don't count favicon.ico requests from NN7.0 in your user bookmarking tally.

Jim

[aspdaddy]

Im quite sure it has to be 16X16 pixels.

[tedster]

Actually a .ico file is a kind of folder or library file that can hold more than one image. You're right, aspdaddy, that one of those images should be 16x16 for a favicon file.

However, the .ico file may also hold a second image at 32x32, and even another 16x16 image. One image can be restricted to the 256 Windows system colors and one image can use a wider color range for systems that are set to display them.

The system automatically chooses the right image from the .ico library for the situation.

For instance, a user can drag a favorite from the browser onto their desktop. For most systems, a file or shortcut on the desktop will display a 32x32 icon - if that resolution is available in the .ico library. If it's not available, then the 16x16 icon will dispay, but scaled up to 32x32. And that situation means some serious jaggies!

So, if you have the software (IconForge for example) to create a multiple image .ico file, then it pays to create both a 16x16 and a 32x32 image while you're in the business of designing a favicon file.

[weesnich]

Mozilla can be configured to ask for the "favicon" for every website you visit and display it in the URL-bar, when using tabbed browsing in the tab-title as well.

I dont know whether is ships as default now, but some time ago it required some action by the user - and I've updated Mozilla several times since than, but keept the configuration.

My experiences are that mozilla accepts a tag like
<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.mysite.de/mydir/favicon.ico">
in the head of the page and displays the correct image. I even tested it right now (using Mozilla 1.1) from mysite.de/anotherdirectory/ .

I'm not shure why it did not work for you - perhaps it should be named favicon?

[weesnich]

Konqueror - the browser of the Linux GUI KDE displays the favicons as well when only visiting a page. You may see this one not to often, but i.E. I'm using it right now for demonstration ;-)

[vibgyor79]

You do not need the favicon.ico file to track bookmarks. The file is requested by IE from your server when bookmarks are done by users no matter if the file exsist or not. If it do not exsist you will still be able to see the hit in your logs (only as a 404 for the file) and anlyse it. Basically you just count the number of hits for favicon.ico for the time frame you are analysing and there you have it: number of bookmarks

I never knew that! And I thought Favicon was a high-tech software that would give me bookmarking pattern "reports". Yeesh!

[Mikkel Svendsen]

Happy to help :)

[Brett_Tabke]

Update: (found this thread via some referrals).

Mozilla and Opera now support Favicon.ico. That means that they use a different method to pull favicons. Opera can do it each and every page.

Thus, bookmarking data based upon favicon calls is no longer valid.

[seindal]

Combined with the user-agent data it should be possible to estimate bookmark frequency anyway.

Depends a bit on how common User-agent faking by browsers like Opera is.

René.