Many sites provide icons using microsoft's favicon.ico file. Mozilla now supports this feature (see bug 32087) and has it enabled by default (see bug 109843) Many people are displeased by this feature, but rather than complaining about it, it is far more constructive to go out and encourage sites to add <link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> to their pages. This bug can be a meta-bug to track those efforts. Benefits of the <link> method include: you are no longer limited to using .ico files. You can also say <link rel="icon" href="happyface.png" type="image/png" /> or even <link rel="icon" href="animating-logo.gif" type="image/gif" /> Users of Mozilla will be able to see the icon without needing to have the browser.chrome.favicons pref enabled. Also, if you say rel="shortcut icon" instead of just "icon" then Internet Explorer will support the tag too, requesting your chosen icon instead of favicon.ico (unfortunately IE only supports image/x-icon whereas Mozilla supports any image type)

I found a free service (registration required) for creating .ico files: http://www.favicon.com/applet.html

ignore my last comment, I missed the point. the point is we don't need to force people to use .ico, you can use any format (gif, png, jpeg) favicons are cool.

Haven't Microsoft already done a good job of evangelising this? Even slashdot has a favicon! <spam> Don't you find it ironic that Mozilla has now embraced and extended a Microsoft feature? </spam>

Slashdot has the Microsoft type of favicon (/favicon.ico even as it does not seem to be a Microsoft icon). We try to promote <link rel="icon" > which is not what Microsoft uses. We can use any graphic file with any name and location (every page on a website can have different favicon). Microsoft uses only one proprietary graphic standard, one name one root directory location (meaning a per site favicon only).

<spam> Actually no, IE supports <link rel="shortcut icon"> but it has to be a .ico. You can have per-page icons in IE </spam> Why should you be evangelising a proprietary extension? Okay, so Mozilla supports open file types, but other browsers (IE and Knoqueror) only support .ico favicons. Maybe you should evangelise the fact that using <link rel="shortcut icon"> as well as <link rel="icon"> will give a different icon for use in Mozilla, so other file formats can be used. But please don't promote <link rel="icon"> without also noting that _only_ Mozilla supports that. It's all very well embracing and extending, but don't split the web up more over this! (</rant>)

Shouldn't Mozilla prefer the "icon" version to the "shortcut icon" version then? At least in my tests it doesn't. One reason to prefer .ico is that it provides for multiple sizes of icons, in case the user drags the icon off onto the desktop and it becomes 32x32 instead of 16x16, it'll still look good at both sizes.

Permit me to explain about rel="icon" vs. rel="shortcut icon" The text of the rel attribute is a list of space-separated words. Any link which contains the "icon" word in its rel= will be recognised as a site-icon. For example, Mozilla would recognize both of the following as an icon: <link rel="icon" href="happyface.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="logo happyness icon image irrelevant blah blah blah" href="happyface.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> Trouble is, when Microsoft added their own support for this link tag, instead of treating the rel= value as a list of space separated words, they treated it as a single string which could contain spaces. Hence, their "shortcut icon" thing. So, when you go to create your own <link> tags for your own site-icons, it would be best to do it like this: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="happyface.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> Mozilla will pick up the "icon" but completely ignore the useless word "shortcut" Whereas the "shortcut" part will keep Internet Explorer happy.

Two post in bug 32087 that belong here: ------- Additional Comment #119 From jks@akula.com 2001-12-03 17:45 ------- FYI: netscape.com and netcenter.com have favicon.ico's but don't have the icon links. ------- Additional Comment #120 From Jacek Piskozub 2001-12-03 18:41 ------- The favicons netscape.center and netcenter.com show are the icon any site powered by Netscape httpd server. Check www.dilbert.com or www.unitedmedia.com for other examples. If you used Netscape 4.* you would see the name "Location" to the left of the URL bar change to "Netsite" when the sites are viewed.

On what versions of IE does <link rel="shortcut icon"> work? Slashdot has that and it still isn't appearing in the url bar in IE 5.

IE doesn't show icons unless you have bookmarked the site. It also deletes it's icons if you delete the cache (Temporary Internet Files directory), and the only way to show them again (that I have found) is to hold shift and drag the address bar into the address bar, thus forcing a reload. I believe site icons were in IE4, but I may be wrong. It was definitely in IE5.

I have tested IE 4 and 5 and they both handle shortcut icons the same-- they obey <link rel="shortcut icon"> but only *after* you bookmark. I havent tested IE 6, so I dont know how it handles them.

James: In IE6 the behavior is no different.

Ok, what do you want to do with this? Who wants to write an article extolling Mozilla and link rel="icon"? How do you want to go about promoting this? sending emails ? publishing an article? where do you want to publish it? We can put it on DevEdge it you want or if it is acceptable to mozilla.org it can go there. Who wants to take ownership of this issue and accept this bug?

Give me a list of things to add, and I'll write the article.

Clarification: Basically, give me a detailed outline of what you want the main points of the article to be.

Removing bug 116594 from dependency list - it has nothing to do with this bug.

We should promote the use of transparancy (in ico, gif, or png) with icons because some sites (for example SlashDot) currently have white backgrounds. These look plain ugly against the Modern theme, particularly in the personal toolbar. Of course the full-alpha support with png is the best option available.

Aggressive favicon.ico requests are now off by default. See bug 120949. I think someone from Netscape/AOL should contact all the major sites that are controlled by AOLTW - cnn.com, netscape.com (!), time.com, etc - and make them use <link>.

>I think someone from Netscape/AOL should contact all the major sites that are >controlled by AOLTW - cnn.com, netscape.com (!), time.com, etc - and make them >use <link>. Make them how? Are *you* going to pay for the labor? If not, then stop asking for a free lunch. It's anywhere from annoying to tyrannical. /be

Tyrannical? Relax, man! I only wrote comment 18 in case someone on the CC list hadn't heard about bug 120949. The part about the AOL-controlled sites is merely what I see as the most logical next thing to do. I wasn't demanding anything, not even asking for it! Look, I didn't mean to sound tyrannical or demanding, and I'm really sorry if I did. But English isn't my first language, you know. When I write something, I have no way of knowing if it will sound offending to someone who knows English better than I do. Maybe comment 18 did, and if so, I'm sorry. Maybe even this comment will sound offending, or tyrannical, or arrogant, even though I didn't intend it to sound that way. But unless I spend a lot of my time studying English, there's nothing I can do about it.

Relax, I was rating the continuum of badness in all these "make 'em add link tags" posts to m.general and bugs such as this -- yours was merely annoying :-). /be

Mass reassign of all tech-evangelism us general bugs assigned to bc to doron except bc's P1 bugs. You may search for this mass reassign (it is 305 bugs) by searching for the keyword 'greeneggsandham'

Does the resolution to bug 3248 include _icon_ LINK tags? If so, that's the angle I think we should evangelize. As a webmaster I think I'd much rather add a single line to the config file than add a line to every page/template/include on my entire site.

You can easily add this to every page simply by using a template, SSI, or other such method. Most people who make large sites don't write each page individually (Except for the body).

BTW, http://www.usnews.com/favicon.ico is a GIF file served with "Content-Type: text/plain" HTTP header. As a result, Mozilla ends up not displaying any icon at all (I woudn't blame it). Is it worth it to file a separate evang bug report on this?

tech evang june 2003 reorg

Bug 116801 is about not doing the aggressive search if people use <link>. Fixing that bug would be an incentive for people to use the <link> method because it would mean that their logs wouldn't have Mozilla junk in there.

<spam> Don't you find it ironic that Mozilla has now embraced and extended a Microsoft feature? </spam> A good idea is a good idea regardless of who thought of it. MAC had a good idea, Microsoft executed it correctly where as they did not. I have a 5 button mouse and use everything Micrsoft provides whereas I find MACs extrodinarily inefficient. The last thing we need are more people trying to split Mozilla from supporting things IE supports. Mozilla doesn't have a 90% market share, it should be the browser that supports things that IE does not. The enhancement of the experience of the surfer is more imporatant then one's personal feelings about why we shouldn't do something because we simply don't like someone or something.

When a webmaster sees 404 in his error log because of favicon.ico requests, he looks on the web and finds that the easiest fix is to create this file at the root. As he will read on the web, adding a link rel is unnecessary. Needless to say, the fastest bug fix is usually the chosen one. With firefox's aggressive search, webmasters will see more and more errors showing up if they don't have this file, and a link rel is still unnecessary. The more annoying it is, the faster this virus spreads. Article evangelism has nowhere near the power of the least effort. The only effective evangelism action would be to remove the fetching of /favicon.ico in firefox.

i think the campaign is now over

...and we apparently lost.

Does anybody have statistics on how many pages on the Web now use a link tag to indicate the location of an icon, versus how many pages have an icon in the "usual" (Microsoftish) location with no link tag? (Pages with no icon either by link tag or "standard" location don't count for either statistic.)