Favicon

What is favicon?
A favicon is a short form or achronym for favorites icon. It is also known as shortcut icon, website icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon. It is a small icon or image displayed at the beginning of  the address bar of the browser and also displayed at the beginning of the title in the browser.

Favicon size: Favicon icon files can be either 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 pixels in size but displays 16 x 16 pixels in size.

Additional  information about favicon: Favicons are either 8-bit or 24-bit in color depth. GIF files have a limited, 256 color palette entries.



Founder of favicon : Simon Butcher is the founder of favicon.

History: In 2003 the .ico format was registered with the  IANA( Assigned Numbers Authority) under the MIME type image/vnd.microsoft.icon, which standardized the .ico file type. The correct mime for icons is image/x-icon.

Browser support:

Browser	ICO	PNG	GIF	animated GIFs	JPEG	APNG	SVG
Google Chrome	Depends	4.0	4.0	No	4.0	No	No
Internet Explorer	4.0	No	No	No	No	No	No
Mozilla Firefox	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	3.0	No
Opera	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	9.6
Safari	Yes	4.0	4.0	No	4.0	No	No

Favicon is supported by Internet Explorer,Mozilla  Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

Format for cross-browser compatible:

<link rel="shortcut icon"  href="http://www.bloggershangout.com/myicon.ico"/>
                                                
                                                    or

<link rel="shortcut icon"  href="/somepath/myicon.ico"/>

Supported format of link tags for HTML and XHTML:

HTML:

• <link rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="http://example.com/image.ico">
• <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="http://example.com/image.png">
• <link rel="icon" type="image/gif" href="http://example.com/image.gif">

XHTML:

• <link rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="/somepath/image.ico" />
• <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/somepath/image.png" />
• <link rel="icon" type="image/gif" href="/somepath/image.gif" />

Advantages: Favicon makes it easy to find blog or website when someone bookmarked your blog/website among serveral blogs/websites.
It makes your blog look professional.

That's all to say about favicon.