favicon.ico is a file to put on the root of an website, Internet Explorer and Firefox will show it on the address bar and favorite/bookmark. Mine are down there, a piece of Tiramisu:
.ico is an Windows Icon file, however it can be seen on Firefox across platforms. It was, originally, proposed and developed by Microsoft, then become the de facto standard with support from Mozilla.
Mozilla proposal for website icon that require <link rel=”icon” /> on header of every html file is still limited on Mozilla products.
The funny thing is Microsoft never put a favicon.ico on their website. Even if they did put one later God-knows-when, they put an icon of white sheet.
I guess they are planing registering the folded sheet as trademark. Oh please don’t.
favicon.ico 是放在網站根目錄的一個圖示，放了之後 IE 和 Firefox 等瀏覽器(KKman 或是 PCMan 不行)就會把它 show 在位址列或是我的最愛/書籤上面。下面是我的圖示，一小片提拉米蘇：
雖然說 .ico 是 Windows 的圖示檔格式，但是其他作業系統的 Firefox 也會順利 show 出來；這個做法原本是 Microsoft 提議的，後來被 Mozilla 支援而變成非正式標準。
原本 Mozilla 提議的作法是在每個 HTML 檔的 header 用 <link rel=”icon” /> 指定它的圖示；這個作法到現在還沒有被其他瀏覽器支援所以比較少人用了。
不過好笑的是，Microsoft 自己從來沒有在它們的網站上放 favicon.ico。就算他們好不容易終於放了，他們竟然放了一個 … 空白文件的圖示？
他們打算把「折一角的A4紙」這個標誌拿去登記商標嗎？拜託。