Image in the Address Bar

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Image in the Address Bar

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Since Microsoft Internet Explorer introduced their latest version, more and more questions are coming up regarding that little image in the address bar. This image is called a favicon and has always been there, just some browsers did a much better job at displaying it than Internet Explorer 6.0.

Usually to make the image show up, put this information into the <head> of the document:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Now, you can also just upload your favicon.ico file to the root and not add anything to your file. The icon should show up in the address bar.

If you are using HTML as your DOCTYPE, then use

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">

since HTML elements do not need to be closed like XHTML.

Creating the FavIcon

There are several ways to create a FavIcon. One program is called Microangelo Toolset. There is also Irfanview which is a free tool.

MIME Type for the FavIcon

You can also contact your hosting company to verify they support favicons and to see what mime type they have the favicons set up to be. Usually it is image/vnd.microsoft.icon, but for compatibility, you can use image/x-icon. Most major browsers though will support image/vnd.microsoft.icon since it is a IANA-registered MIME type.