Are you crazy about displaying your company icon in your address bar. I am giving you some good information here.

A favicon (short for favorite icon, sometimes understood as favorites icon), also known as a website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, or bookmark icon is a 16×16 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon and install it into a website (or webpage) by several means, and most 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 and next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks.

Internet Explorer (“IE”) 5.0 and above has a facility where, if someone bookmarks your website (ie puts it in their “Favorites” menu), it associates a particular icon with your website in the bookmark. It tries to obtain that icon by first requesting for “favicon.ico” from the directory of your web page. If it cannot find such a file, it will try to obtain it from the root directory of your website, failing which, it will simply use a default icon for the bookmark.

On the other hand, the favicon.ico file is available, the icon will also be displayed beside your website name in the “Favorites” menu, the location bar in IE, and if the user opens up the “Favorites” folder, it will be the icon used for the link to your site.

Opera and Firefox also have the ability to use the favicon.ico file. In fact, Firefox also accepts the file in other graphics formats, such as the PNG format. These browsers display the “favicon.ico” in the location bar of the browser.
Are you ready to create favorites icons?. Checkout how to create Favicon.ico

Helping the Browser Locate the favicon.ico file

If you have placed your favicon.ico file in a location other than the current web directory (relative to your web page) or the root directory, you have to help your visitors’ browser locate the favicon file by specifying it with a tag like the following in the section of your web page.

You should replace “/favicon.ico” in the above example with the actual location of your favicon.ico file, for example, “/images/favicon.ico” if you have placed it in your “/images/” directory.

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