Okay, I know I read about this on the SDMB before, but searching has yielded no results so I’ll ask, in hopes that someone either knows where the other thread is, or knows the answer.
In Mozilla Firefox, a good 75% of the sites I visit have customized icons in the address/location bar, which then become the bookmark icons if added to the bookmarks. I know that IE has this capability, but I’ve rarely seen it used in IE, and once I started using Firefox, dozens of sites had them.
How is this accomplished, from a site maintainer’s perspective? And why do so many more sites have icons that show up in Firefox than in IE?
I don’t think it’s a fav ico thing… I know that’s been around for a while with IE, but Google, for example, doesn’t have one. So that’s what led me to believe that Firefox uses something else.
I have noticed Firefox (I’m running v0.9.1) can be a bit wonky with favorite icons. In fact right now my bookmark for SDMB shows the icon for Fark.com. Go figure.
I’ve also had the icons switch back to the default Firefox icon from time to time, but I’m not sure if that’s related to ending my session prematurely (stupid Windows 98) or perhaps it’s a ‘feature’ that reverts icons back on sites I haven’t visited after X many days. I have no idea, but if that’s the one thing wrong with Firefox, it’s still a million times better than IE.
Basically, Firefox seems to look for the icon everytime* you visit a webpage, but Internet Explorer only gets the icon after you add the URL to your Favorites. So for webpages that have icons, Firefox will show the page’s icon in the URL bar everytime, whereas MSIE will show the icon only after you’ve added it to your Favorites. I think both browsers store the icons in their caches.
*I’m not sure if Firefox tries to get the icon once or everytime you visit a webpage.
