Favicon.ico inconsistency

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Favicon.ico inconsistency

rogerd

6:26 pm on Dec 4, 2001 (gmt 0)

I almost always create a favicon.ico for a site I'm working on - I think it adds a bit of professionalism, and it's easy to track requests for the file to see how many IE users are bookmarking the page.

I've noticed, though, that my browsers (IE) don't always seem to pick it up. Or, if they pick it up, sometimes they seem to lose track of it and the favorite listing goes back to the default "e".

Is this some sort of weirdness in IE, or am I missing something simple?

mivox

6:35 pm on Dec 4, 2001 (gmt 0)

Things I've noticed: If you already have the site bookmarked, you need to delete the bookmark and then "re-favoritize" the site to pick up the favicon... and I did once have all my favicons disappear from my favorites menu, but I can't remember what I did... if I cleared my history, emptied the cache, or what.

It's not just you though. :) Any IE experts care to enlighten us?

msr986

7:44 pm on Dec 4, 2001 (gmt 0)

Support for favicons is poor in IE. It does not get better with IE6.0 either. In addition to the problems of not picking up the icon, favicons are stored with your temporary internet files. This means that you will loose your favicons when you delete your TIF's. One way to get around the problem is to download and use a program called "favorg" available from pc magazine. This program will support favicons only if they are located in the root directory of the website. Even after using this program, I found that I had to use TweakUI "Repair Icons" to force IE to propery display favicons. Handling favicons should be a simple matter, but with MS, sometimes nothing is simple.

Marty

wasmith

6:31 am on Dec 5, 2001 (gmt 0)

Seems to work for me about as long as windows 98 works. As msr986 said the favicon is stored like temp files it is not recorded well nor does IE check for new versions like it does for web pages.

jammy

7:51 am on Dec 5, 2001 (gmt 0)

-edit- it's still the morning, i wasn't awake to read all the posts.. hehe :) ahh well -/edit-

The favourite icon is lost any time you clear your cache. FavOrg (a little utility by my favourite pc mag - PCMagazine) grabs that same icon and copies it to a 'safe' folder, where it won't get thrown away. If there is no favicon.ico, FavOrg doesn't do anything automatically.

You can use FavOrg to assign icons to favorites even if they don't intrinsically have their own icon.

prog is 470k and freeware, just search for "FavOrg" using that thing called a search engine, i assume you lot know how to use one of them ;)

mark :)

rogerd

1:04 pm on Dec 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the input... I knew about the problem of an existing favorite, but didn't associate the loss of the icons with cache-clearing. Sounds like a good feature that was very poorly implemented. Nothing a few more million lines of code in Windows won't fix... :)

mivox

6:23 pm on Dec 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

Nothing a few more million lines of code in Windows won't fix...

Hehehehe.... Just let's hope they don't leave some kind of loophole for a favicon-borne virus while they're doing it,

rogerd

6:52 pm on Dec 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

>>a favicon-borne virus<<

No doubt under development as we speak! You read it here first, folks! :)

markbar

3:25 am on Dec 9, 2001 (gmt 0)

I put favicons in all my sites root web. I got rid of all the old favorites and they still didn't all display. Fortunately my main one always does. Go figure

gethan

8:20 pm on Dec 9, 2001 (gmt 0)

To get favicons with mozilla based browsers put this line in your <head> section.

msr986

9:29 pm on Dec 9, 2001 (gmt 0)

In the newest builds of Mozilla 0.9.6+ you do not need to put in the <link> tag. It picks up the favicon in your root directory automatically. The newest Moz also recognizes the standard <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" ...> tag same as IE