favicon - shortcut icons

When Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) is asked to fetch a page from a website directory it has not yet seen, it also makes an additional request to see if there is a file named favicon.ico in the same website directory. If so, MSIE displays that "shortcut icon" in the Address bar icon (instead of the default ), and also in the Favorites list and Links bar if you place a shortcut to that website in either place.

It is amazing that the ICO file format is not well documented. It appears that to make an ICO file, you make a 16x16 Windows bitmap file, and instead of saving it as favicon.bmp you name it as favicon.ico.

Here is a favicon article from Microsoft.

Here are some sample favicon.ico files. The way I got these was to visit a website that had an icon, and then add "/favicon.ico" to the address bar URL, then right-clicked on the resulting image, and chose "Save Picture As..." to save it to my PC.