Favicons.

A **favicon** /ˈfæv.ɪˌkɒn/ (short for **favorite icon**), also known as a **shortcut icon**, **website icon**, **tab icon**, **URL icon**, or **bookmark icon**, is a file containing one or more small icons,associated with a particular website or web page. A web designer can create such an icon and upload it to a website (or web page) by several means, and graphical web browsers will then make use of it. Browsers that provide favicon support typically display a page's favicon in the browser's address bar (sometimes in the history as well) and next to the page's name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page's favicon next to the page's title on the tab, and site-specific browsers use the favicon as a desktop icon.

Favicons can also be used to have a textless favourite site, saving space

## History

In March 1999, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5, which supported favicons for the first time. Originally, the favicon was a file called `favicon.ico` placed in the root directory (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico) of a web site. It was used in Internet Explorer's *favorites* (bookmarks) and next to the URL in the address bar if the page was bookmarked. A side effect was that the number of visitors who have bookmarked the page could be estimated by the requests of the favicon. This side effect no longer works, as all modern browsers load the favicon file to display in their web address bar, regardless of whether the site is bookmarked.

### **Standardization**

The favicon was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the HTML 4.01 recommendation, released in December 1999, and later in the XHTML 1.0 recommendation, released in January 2000.The standard implementation uses a link element with a `rel` attribute in the `<head>` section of the document to specify the file format and file name and location. Unlike in the prior scheme, the file can be in any Web site directory and have any image file format.

In 2003, the `.ico` format was registered by a third party with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) under the MIME type `image/vnd.microsoft.icon`. Ironically, when using the `.ico` format to display as images (e.g. not as favicon), Internet Explorer cannot display files served with this standardized MIME type. A workaround for Internet Explorer is to associate `.ico` with the non-standard `image/x-icon`MIME type in Web servers.

RFC 5988 established an IANA link relation registry,[and `rel="icon"` was registered in 2010 based on the HTML5 specification. The popular `<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" />` theoretically identifies two relations, "`shortcut`" and "`icon`", but "`shortcut`" is not registered and is redundant. In 2011 the HTML living standard specified that for historical reasons "`shortcut`" is allowed immediately before "`icon`";however, "`shortcut`" does not have a meaning in this context.

### **Legacy**

Internet Explorer 5–10 supports only the ICO file format. Netscape 7 and Internet Explorer versions 5 and 6 browsers display the favicon only when the page is bookmarked, and not simply when the page is visited as in later browsers