A long time ago (when TechTV was ZDTV) I saw something about customized icons in browser bars, and how basic and simple it was. I “designed” one myself, set up a quick webpage to test it and sure enough, it worked just fine.
I saw a few in my travels across the net, but to me it seemed like an disproportionately low number compared to the ease in setting this up. Obviously this is something I’ve given thought to only in the moments between page loads, and not really up there on my list of life’s mysteries.
However, I finally switched to Opera recently, and all these sites that I’ve been visiting all this time DO have custom icons - I mean sites from the miniscule and mundane, to large sites like CNN> SO what gives? Why can’t I see them in IE? I can’t seem to find an option to turn this on or off anywhere, and like I said, I have actually seen a few wth IE- but very few, and not at sites that I now know to have them.
I have noticed that many times the custom icons don’t show up for me either in IE as they would in others browsers. It seems almost random. If you add it to your favorites it seems to show up more often. I just chalked that up to another Microsoft Internet Explorer feature.
Under IE, the icon of a favorite is nothing special, just one more cached part of the web page it’s connected to.
How long it’ll stay on your system is simply a function of how long anything lives in your cache before it’s overwritten to make room for newer stuff. If you have a huge cache and don’t surf much, that may be years. if you have a small cache and/or surf a lot with big graphics-heavy pages, then it may only last a couple of days.