{"id":179442,"date":"2014-08-18T12:47:10","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T19:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/css-tricks.com\/?p=179442"},"modified":"2019-01-11T08:28:55","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T15:28:55","slug":"favicon-quiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/favicon-quiz\/","title":{"rendered":"Favicons, Touch Icons, Tile Icons, etc. Which Do You Need?"},"content":{"rendered":"
The following is a guest post by Philippe Bernard. Philippe has done research on what it takes to make a favicon (and all the related graphics and markup) such that you are covered with the best quality output everywhere. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot of different graphics and markup. Also full disclosure: Philippe has built a tool to help with it he showcases in the article.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Favicons were introduced in 1999 by Internet Explorer 5 (ref<\/a>) and standardized by the W3C a few months later. They are a small graphic that represents the website. <\/p>\n Since then, most desktop browsers have followed the trend and used favicons in some way. It’s an easy job, isn’t it? Just create a small picture to add to any web project to make it “final”. Nothing fancy. Or is it?<\/p>\n Let’s do a quiz!<\/p>\n Answer: Answer: D.<\/strong><\/p>\n Desktop browsers often use the favicon in a tab, and on standard resolution displays, the 16×16 version is fine:<\/p>\n But a 16×16 icon is too small for other places: the task bar and the desktop.<\/p>\n As soon as the icon contains several pictures, the results are much better.<\/p>\nWhat is the primary favicon file?<\/h3>\n
favicon.ico<\/code>.<\/strong> And just to make sure: this is not<\/em> a PNG renamed to
favicon.ico<\/code>. Although some browsers are easygoing enough to forgive this mistake, ICO is a different format, one that supports multiple versions of an image.<\/p>\n
Question: What dimensions should
favicon.ico<\/code> be?<\/h3>\n
\n
favicon.ico<\/code> is a format originally conceived by Microsoft and the other vendors have gone along with it. Microsoft recommends<\/a> 16×16, 32×32 and<\/em> 48×48. Yes, a single ICO file can contain multiple graphics.<\/p>\n
Question: What is the purpose of
favicon.png<\/code>?<\/h3>\n