it's about software patent law, and it really sux. if the gov approve it, you can't use open source program like linux, and start buying buggy appz from large soft company at high price ...

about the favicon in ie it only works in bookmarks on most ie ver.

So it's true what they say... If Linux is outlawed, only outlaws will run Linux.
That would be a major blow to the growth of technology if they passed a law like that.

real gr8 tutorial, but just 1 thing, MSPaint CAN do .ico files

just do save as...
filetype doesnt matter, name the file favicon.ico and it will work too!

For anyone tired of their ol' Windows Icons, here's a neat little program I found that will make icons.

http://www.axiomx.com/PixelToolbox/

I just take a photo I want to be an icon, resize it to 32x32, and import it into this program, and "My Computer" thus transforms into "My Laetitia Casta"

MSPaint can't do proper .ico files, it is a proper file extension and is created different to other file formats. Just because you can name a file .ico doesn't mean it's correct, however it still can work with some browsers as they can interpret most file formats as favicon, FireFox/Mozilla support favicon.png, favicon.jpg, favicon.bmp and favicon.gif and quite possibly more.

Cheers,


MC

I thought I may as well list Linux (Fedora Core 3) instructions to creating favicons.

What I will be using for this:

KIconEditor
png2ico

Now we don't have to use KIconEditor, we can use any Graphics program that can create .png file formats, I just used KIconEditor, as it was pretty basic and was suitable for this.

run kiconedit

This program is used for creating KDE Icons for the KDE Graphical User Interface (GUI), and is an excellent program to use for what we want, it can create both 16 x 16 pixel and 32 x 32 pixel file sizes as well as whatever other sizes you want to specify, but since we're creating favicons, we want to create a 16 x 16 pixel sized area for us to work with. To do this:

Click on Edit in the menu bar, click on Resize near the bottom, change both sizes to 16, e.g. 16 x 16 and now click on OK.

We now have an area to work with, it might be too small to see, so using the magnifying glass with the + (plus sign) to enlarge it to a suitable size so that you can work well with it. I decided to create a simple floppy disk, I filled all the squares black, created the metal tab with a silvery grey and added a while label, with lines, I also marked out the holes with a light colour, white will do. Pretty simple wasn't it? Check out My Favicons Area under floppy to see how it turned out.

Now all that's needed is to save the file. So click on the Save button or browse to file save, default selection should allow us to save the file format as a .png image, if not, choose PNG Image as the filter and save the file as favicon to your home directory.

Now to convert it to an icon. We can now close KIconEditor, as we are now finished with it. Open up terminal, it should automatically start you off in your home directory.

Now all we need to do is to issue a simple command:

png2ico favicon.ico --colors 16 favicon.png

After executing that command we now should have a favicon.ico file in our home directory, what is left to do is to upload it to your web server in your root directory, fill in the HTML for it and be done with it.

For more information on png2ico, just do:

man png2ico

And that will explain the major use of that program. In short terms, basically what that command did was take the name of what we wanted to call it, specify how many colors we are using, default is 256 colors but we only wanted to use 16 to be safe and more browser compatible and then we told it which file we wanted to convert, and hey presto, done.

Well that's all for now,

Any comments or questions, please feel free to ask and be sure to check out My Favicons Area .

Cheers,


MC

Its good learning about Favicon...
and i feel the icon can strenthen your bussiness attitude....

If anyone's interested, there is a very good favicon creator at DynamicDrive (it even supports transparency), and a good online Java favicon creator here.

Am using IE6 when i visit google.com i won't find those fov icons in the address bar, but when i use FireFox am able, Why not in IE6, do i need to configure, if yes hw to do it?

Hey arunkumarhg,

I'll search the MS Knowledge base and find a 'factual' reason, to me the way I see it is browser improvement, if you didn't realise this, everytime you visit a website, your browser actually looks for a favicon icon in your root directory first, this means there has to be an exhange of server and client commands so that it can be processed and sent to you, else you'd be sent a 'Does Not Exist' error (won't be visible but the web server logs do log these errors).

It's a good idea for web developers to include a favicon image, as it makes loading time quicker, if favicon.ico does not exist, it will wait for a file timeout before it continues.

As far as I know, IE may have stopped favicon being detected to improve browser performance, or they want you to see their icon all the time.

If you visit a site such as www.google.com, and in your address bar is the IE favicon, hold the shift key down, click and hold that icon with your left mouse button, and drag it over the URL and drop it (all done inside the address bar), the favicon should show now, if the site had one.

I've just updated my favicons site with a better layout, I will also fix up the present icon files to make them 100% compatible with IE so that they can be viewed without having to see black shadows, this means I will no longer be creating .png files.

cheers,


MC