That is a really lame favicon

Not the design. That’s pretty much the same design I use myself, but the terrible pixelation that occured during resizing.

I’m sure we have more than a few photochop savvy people that would be willing to make a nice looking one. But go resize it in something other than MSPaint, at least.

OK. I’ll bite. What is a “favicon”?

What the heck?

your humble TubaDiva

A favicon is the little icon that appears in the address bar next to the web address in compatible browsers. I think.

Something like this

I don’t get a favicon for this site, but for some reason, on my Firefox favorites bar, my Straight Dope link has somehow commandeered the Google favicon for itself.

Visits to my grandmother’s house when I was a child were always highlighted by Uncle Willie getting out the old favicon and playing to all hours of the morning.

I don’t see any favicon either (Mozilla Firefox - it shows not only in the address bar but on the tab), but now that someone’s mentioned it, it’d be a great time to get one. Give the Board just that more personality.

…just that much more.

I think this year’s favicon is at the Meadowlands Sheraton in East Rutherford, NJ.

Yeah, but it wont be as good as last year’s, when Favi himself actually showed up. He was incredibly gracious and stayed quite late chatting with fans and signing autographs, despite being visibly weary due (no doubt) to his well publicized health problems.

Just last weekend at the tapas place, my favorite dish was a delectable sliver of smoked favicon, sprinkled with shaved manchego and napped with a drizzle of herbed olive oil. Oh, and there was a jaunty sprig of thyme stuck into it like the flag we planted on the moon.

Hot damn.

Okay, I’ve tried it in Forefox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape, and I still don’t see any favicon. I just get the generic one that goes with any page that doesn’t have one of its own.

I’m not sure there is one. I’m not sure how reliable this is, but if you put in the name of the website plus “favicon.ico” you should be able to see the icon directly. For example, http://www.msnbc.com/favicon.ico shows msnbc’s favicon. I tried it with this site and came up with nada.

well, in doing that, I get a really ugly little checkmark, but I’ve never seen it before. (Using: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/favico.ico)

OK, it DID work but suddenly it doesn’t work. Huh.

Duh, I broke the link.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/favicon.ico

(Sorry, sorry, I know. I promise this is the last post.)

It would appear that the favicon I linked to is actually vBulletin’s favicon. (It’s a V, not a check mark as I thought.)

It seems to show up in GQ.

It’s pretty obviously the S and D from “THE STRAIGHT DOPE” banner, stretched a bit to fill a square evenly and then resized to serve as an icon.

And the reason it looks just like the one I did is because, quite inexplicably, it is the one I did, linked locally/manually. Except I don’t recall doing it, and it only started working in the past couple of days.

So, mystery solved. And it looks like crap because it’s was 64x64 and Firefox was resizing it. I cut it down to size in a nice program and it looks better now. :smack:

How to do it in Firefox?
Right click on a bookmark.
Select Properties…
Click on “Tab Settings”
Page “Referrer and Favicon”
Input the URL for the icon (file:/// type URLs accepted)

THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO a race of super advanced aliens constructed the favicon in order to bring peace to post WWII Earth. But alas, the humans used it for evil, using the favicon to enslave the aliens and forcing their new slaves to builds the great temple city of Las Vegas.