Inventing Favicon.ico
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Inventing Favicon.ico
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Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#2having read it..
You need to get a life and realise how much pain and suffering you have caused us all non m$ users.
To this day its a pain.. even a png auto would suffice..
What would be your plan NOW ? For everyones sanity . check
Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#3having read it.. You need to get a life and realise how much pain and suffering you have caused us all non m$ users. To this day its a pain.. even a png auto would suffice.. What would be your plan NOW ? For everyones sanity . check
ICO's a perfectly reasonable format for small icons, and PNG was still a new format then.
I've written stuff that handled the ICO format; it's simpler and easier to load than PNG/GIF/JPG (unless you already have libraries for the latter, of course - which wasn't a given in browsers at the time). I don't think their choice was wrong at all, especially since ICO loading was at the time built into the OS, so any Windows browser that wanted to load favicons didn't even have to build their own loader.
EDIT: Plus, if you're complaining about 'favicon.ico', it's no worse than robots.txt. At the time the modern 'link rel="icon"' approach was definitely not in common use so it's no wonder nobody at MS chose it, and people probably would have complained loudly about MS introducing 'some proprietary icon HTML'.
Another reason ICO is good as a favicon format is that it makes it impossible for site authors to accidentally use a 500KB image file as their icon (which you could trivially do with png, gif, jpg, etc.) - ICO is intentionally a file format for small images, tailor-made for what icons were like in that era. So by relying on ICO they ensured that the favicon.ico on each site would be small, cheap to download, easy to cache, and easy to author.
Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#4Really cool reading this back story, in 2010 I launched a web search engine that displayed search results as favicons (no text, image only). The goal was to appeal to kids (using images and not text) and mobile devices (I generally find only 3 search results fit on a mobile screen using standard search engines, but the favicon engine allowed a user to see 30 search results on the screen at once)...the traction did not last and it was shut down. Nevertheless, great learning experience and my fondness of favicons and their importance only grew.
Edit: The part about Yahoo also made me recall a prior version on Yahoo's mobile search which displayed favicons prominently to the left of the search result text (first thing your eyes saw was the favicon), and at the time I felt Yahoo had the most aesthetically pleasing results page of all the search engines on mobile, all because the addition of the favicons.
Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#5having read it.. You need to get a life and realise how much pain and suffering you have caused us all non m$ users. To this day its a pain.. even a png auto would suffice.. What would be your plan NOW ? For everyones sanity . check
>> You need to get a life and realise how much pain and suffering you have caused us all non m$ users.
Of all the pain and suffering that Microsoft programmers have caused the rest of the world, favicons have got to be near the bottom of the list.
Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#6Why does this link to the blog and not the article referenced in the title?
Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#7Really cool reading this back story, in 2010 I launched a web search engine that displayed search results as favicons (no text, image only). The goal was to appeal to kids (using images and not text) and mobile devices (I generally find only 3 search results fit on a mobile screen using standard search engines, but the favicon engine allowed a user to see 30 search results on the screen at once)...the traction did no…
DuckDuckGo uses favicons in the way you described: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=favicon
Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#8I thought favicon is W3C standard. It's not standardized yet! I can't find any specs for it!
Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#9Re: Inventing Favicon.ico
#10Nice article. I love how some of the most widely used stuff now days is just something random that some developer at the time thought up whimsically.