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Why aren't my favicons displayed?

Hello Dave, I work on Mac OS X and I have been trying to add a favicon.ico to my website's address bar, only to find that it only shows when I open it with Netscape or Firefox, all the other browsers like Safari and Explorer don't seem to recognize it.... Can you help?? It is driving me mad...


Dave's Answer:

Thanks for your note. I went through this same hassle when I added a favicon.ico to some of my sites after having them up and live for months on end. The basic problem is that browsers cache the favicons and never seem to check if the site has a new icon (or has gone from a generic or missing icon to one that's actually specified).

The easiest way to try and fix things is to choose "Empty Cache..." from the Safari menu in Apple's Safari browser, but it's pretty unlikely that'll work because, well, it's just too darn easy. Fortunately, I've already addressed this issue with Safari in two related articles: selectively removing Safari favicons from your cache and Why doesn't Safari show me favicons?. Read those two, they'll show you how to fix Safari to show your icons, I'm sure.

Getting Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac happy is a different subject. From all I can tell, MSIE only grabs the favicon.ico graphic if you bookmark the site. Otherwise it just uses the generic icon that's used for every other Web site on the net.

Just for good luck, you are using the right format for your favicon too, right? There are two approaches. The basic one is:

<link rel="shortcut icon" 
  href="http://www.askdavetaylor.com/favicon.ico"></link>

but if you don't want to monkey with the ".ico" graphics format, it turns out that other common Web graphics formats are supported, including GIF, JPEG and PNG. To use one of those, specify the "MIME" filetype:

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-png"
  href="http://www.askdavetaylor.com/favicon.png"></link>

I hope that helps you out and gets everything working as you want!



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Comments

When checking my stats I've notice that quite a lot of thieves are downloading my entire web pages to their local hard drives. Does this increase my bandwidth use? And is there way to stop them from doing this? I have their IP address but don't know what to do with it.

Posted by: David Holmes at April 26, 2007 11:23 AM

Hi, thanks for this - completely forgot about the link tag thingy. Works a treat now.

Cheerio!

Posted by: CurtJ at June 9, 2009 10:10 AM

Hello Dave,

I use RapidWeaver to build my sites, and have noticed that my favicons display on the first page only.

This problem occurs in ALL my sites. What is going on?

Posted by: Andreas Belivanakis at February 16, 2010 2:57 AM

Andreas, I'm pretty sure that you should have the favicon information on every page, not just your home page. See if you can just make it appear everywhere within RapidWeaver?

Posted by: Dave Taylor at February 16, 2010 10:46 AM

And here is another weird thing:

http://www.elafonisos-island.com

This site has a home page, 3 under-construction pages, and a contact page. The favicon appears on the home page (as usual), does not appear on the contact page (as usual), but does appear on the 3 under-construction pages (a first) but in abysmally poor quality.

This has never happened to me before. Very weird!

Posted by: Andreas at February 17, 2010 3:20 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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