Why can't you just create or resize your icon in GIMP and save it as an ICO file?

It's easy as entering 'favicon.ico' as the file name when you're saving and GIMP will automatically choose the ICO format. Don't bother compressing it.

The matter hardly warrants an article on a news site. Not in 2008, anyway.

Its like this because IE interchanges regular windows shortcuts, and URL shortcuts... which are just windows shortcuts in a specific folder.

You dont need any special tag, just place favicon.ico in the root of the site and you're done.

If you don't like the site's icon for itself, or they didnt bother to make one, you can give it a different one from your hard drive just by accessing the shortcut's properties. Thats very useful.

http://www.favicon.co.uk/

or 

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

or

http://www.webscriptlab.com/favicongenerator.php

or

http://www.favicongenerator.com/

or

http://www.favicon.cc/


the list goes on.

Seams this journalist is a bit slow.

Of course it works that way, sheep. I'd try to explain, but that'd be a waste of time.


Remember the guy who went around his elbow...

Yes, there are a few bits of HTML (and CSS) that seem to have been bodged somewhat. Things like the conventions surrounding web forms are pretty nasty in some ways. Unfortunately backwards-compatibility to the HTML 4 and below days when not all the browsers really understood the standards and made up their own as they went along has a lot to answer for.

And now they can't make web forms sane without breaking various shopfronts.

Compared to that malarkey, the favicon thing is OK, though I do think Microsoft could get rid of the dumb caching.

I hate favicons. The tend to be really rather ugly and turn your bookmark lists in a disgusting patchwork mess. Fortunately, there is a tweak in Firegiraffe that allows you to disable them completely - you can enter the following into user.js:

user_pref("browser.chrome.site_icons", false); 
user_pref("browser.chrome.favicons", false);

Claimer: I have no interest in this site, I'm just reporting the news.

You can upload a regular graphic file and have a complete multi-format icon generated by going here: 

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

I expect they use ImageMagick or something like that under the covers, but it really beats a lot of alternatives.

Thanks for wasting 30 seconds of my life.

Your website still sucks. Let me fix it.

.. love the end user usefulness of favicons, allows saving of all my usual websites without text cluttering everything up. 

Oh, and a major pain is IE won't let you save a favicon shortcut with no text label. 

Which is no problem for me. Firefox rules etc...

More modern code/image format would be... 

<link rel="icon" href="images/myicon.png" type="image/png" />

Safari and Firefox support it great, but I can't get it to work with IE7. Big surprise.