Animated Favicons

Unused for a Reason?

[inuwolf]

I ran into an animated favicon today for the first time ever. I didn't know it was possible to display an animated GIF (or anything other than ICO) as an icon, but I was immediately won over by the niftiness of it. Seeing it soon brought up the question "why haven't I seen anything like this before?"

Are animated favicons unused for a reason? I know animated GIFs in sites are a big NO-NO; they are very distracting and will send many users off the site as quickly as they arrived. But the particular animated favicon I ran into just ran through its animated loop three times and stopped. It was just distracting enough to get me to stop, look over the page, and reload it. This seems like a very good gimmick that, if done tastefully, could keep viewers on your site for a little longer. Randomizing or seasonalizing the favicon (having the first few loops different but ending in the same favicon) and you could have people return to your site just for the icon!

Why has no one done this? Am I missing something here?

[Stefan]

That's a great question.

I first saw one months ago - never learned how it was done, and basically forgot about it until now. They must load quickly, and it's relatively discrete, not like some tacky dancing .gif moving across the page.

Perhaps we'll get some expert advice on it in this thread.

[JollyK]

Hrm. I've never seen that, but I wonder how many people have stickied you for the URL so they can check it out? :-)

Actually, the whole favicon.ico isn't really part of any specification, is it? I mean, isn't it just some thing that Internet Explorer started doing and then everyone picked up on it because so many people had Internet Explorer, and then Mozilla et al started supporting because IE did it, etc ...?

Or is there a "favicon" specification somewhere?

What browser were you using?

JK

[inuwolf]

To preempt any stickiness, here's the HTML code for the animated favicon:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://?.com/favicon.ico" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://www.?.com/animated_favicon.gif" type="image/gif" / >

It looks pretty straightforward: the .gif is treated like an icon but an .ico is also posted for backup. I also downloaded and opened the .gif file and it ran just as it appeared in the icon. So apparently not only is this cool, there's no trick involved.

JollyK, when I visited the site I was using Firefox. When I revisited it in IE the icon didn't display, but it didn't display Webmasterworld's icon either--oh IE... I'm pretty sure "favicon" is just an arbitrary naming convention like "style" for css. In a few years animated favicon will probably also be a convention, but for now Stefan and I are left scratching our heads.

[Robin_reala]

The "shortcut icon" link is for IE - it doesn't unerstand anything but MS's .ico format. However Firefox (and other browsers?) will let you use an image of any type it understands for an icon, including animated gifs. You do lose out on one of the benefits of the .ico format though which is the ability to package both a 16x16 icon for the browser and a 32x32 icon for the desktop. I believe Firefox will resize your 32x32 gif icon down for the address bar but that's not always what you want.

[DrDoc]

Another reason why it is unused could simply be that most find animations annoying :)

[JollyK]

Another reason why it is unused could simply be that most find animations annoying!

Oh HO! I'll bet you're one of those people who didn't like the <BLINK> tag EITHER! Admit it! ADMIT IT!

Blinkie Killlaaaaaaahhhhh!

*snort*

:-)

JK

[edit: removed icon text]

[inuwolf]

Another reason why it is unused could simply be that most find animations annoying :)

That was my initial suspicion, but then I turned it the thought on its head: although good sites would not use this feature because it can be annoying, there are plenty of annoying sites that would love this. This would be a welcome addition to any site with status bar messages, marquees, custom cursors, error message greetings, and yes *shudder* blinking graphics. But it isn't; I've only seen it once--ever.

This can definitely be done tastefully, as it was on the site I encountered it. I just don't think people know about it.

[kaled]

I saw this a week or so ago (can't remember where). I assumed that the site used an animated icon. It's possible that this would work too (rather than use a .gif).

Kaled.

[pmkpmk]

When I revisited it in IE the icon didn't display, but it didn't display Webmasterworld's icon either

IE only shows the favicon if you bookmark the page. In the pre-Firefox-era a request for the favicon in the lgofiles was a sign that the page got bookmarked.

[Robin_reala]

I can actually think of a good place for an animated favicon :) I've recently submitted a patch that adds favicons to each page to a popular open source web service. The point of my patch is to make it immediately obvious when having a lot of pages open which pages show a certain (undesired) state. Having animated gifs would definitely draw your eye to them.

[DrDoc]

What do you mean by "undesired state"?

[Stefan]

Another reason why it is unused could simply be that most find animations annoying :)

True enough. The favicon isn't intruding on the page though, so maybe it wouldn't be quite as annoying. The novelty factor might be valuable, somewhat, unless it becomes common and vulgar :-)

Robin - great idea.

[Robin_reala]

DrDoc - I was trying not to name names, but hey ;) My patch adds favicons to indicate 'valid' or 'invalid' to validator.w3.org