Creating a Favicon

What is the best practice for creating a favicon on a web site?

There are several ways to create a favicon. The best way for you depends on various factors:

• The time you can spend on this task. For many people, this is "as quick as possible".
• The efforts you are willing to make. Like, drawing a 16x16 icon by hand for better results.
• Specific constraints, like supporting a specific browser with odd specs.

First method: Use a favicon generator

If you want to get the job done well and quickly, you can use a favicon generator. This one creates the pictures and HTML code for all major desktop and mobiles browsers. Full disclosure: I'm the author of this site.

Advantages of such solution: it's quick and all compatibility considerations were already addressed for you.

Second method: Create a favicon.ico (desktop browsers only)

As you suggest, you can create a favicon.ico file which contains 16x16 and 32x32 pictures (note that Microsoft recommends 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48).

Then, declare it in your HTML code:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/icons/favicon.ico">

This method will work with all desktop browsers, old and new. But most mobile browsers will ignore the favicon.

About your suggestion of placing the favicon.ico file in the root and not declaring it: beware, although this technique works on most browsers, it is not 100% reliable. For example Windows Safari cannot find it (granted: this browser is somehow deprecated on Windows, but you get the point). This technique is useful when combined with PNG icons (for modern browsers).

Third method: Create a favicon.ico, a PNG icon and an Apple Touch icon (all browsers)

In your question, you do not mention the mobile browsers. Most of them will ignore the favicon.ico file. Although your site may be dedicated to desktop browsers, chances are that you don't want to ignore mobile browsers altogether.

You can achieve a good compatibility with:

• favicon.ico, see above.
• A 192x192 PNG icon for Android Chrome
• A 180x180 Apple Touch icon (for iPhone 6 Plus; other device will scale it down as needed).

Declare them with

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/icons/favicon.ico">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/path/to/icons/favicon-192x192.png" sizes="192x192">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/path/to/icons/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png">

This is not the full story, but it's good enough in most cases.

How can I create a favicon locally with a script?

You could use imagemagik convert. I took these commands from this website.

First make a master image:

convert some_image.bmp -resize 256x256 -transparent white
favicon-256.png

Then we'll want to make images for each size you want to include in
the .ico file.

convert favicon-256.png -resize 16x16 favicon-16.png

convert favicon-256.png -resize 32x32 favicon-32.png

convert favicon-256.png -resize 64x64 favicon-64.png

convert favicon-256.png -resize 128x128 favicon-128.png

Now you'll want to bundle them up into the .ico file, the trick I
found is to make it 256 colors or it will not display properly!

convert favicon-16.png favicon-32.png favicon-64.png favicon-128.png
favicon-256.png -colors 256 favicon.ico

HOW TO BUILD A FAVICON GENERATOR

Have you taken a look at Pillow? Generating images and exporting to various formats is very easy here. You should be able to get up and running within minutes after googling some basic tutorials

How do I make a favicon?

Put a favicon.ico graphic file in the document root of your webserver. For BlueHost, put it in your public_html folder.

To create a facivon.ico file, you can search Google for "favicon generator". and go to a site like http://www.favicon.cc/ to generate it.

How to create a favicon in javascript?

If simple, form based graphics suffice, one can use HTML5 Canvas to create a favicon. There have been successful attempts to modify a favicon image after loading it. Analogously one can create a favicon entirely in javascript using the basic canvas API. The following example creates and sets a grey favicon with a green square on it:

<script>
    var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
    canvas.width = 16;
    canvas.height = 16;
    var ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');
    ctx.fillStyle = "#aaa";
    ctx.fillRect(0, 0, 16, 16);
    ctx.fillStyle = "#afa";
    ctx.fillRect(4, 4, 8, 8);            
    var link = document.createElement('link');
    link.type = 'image/x-icon';
    link.rel = 'shortcut icon';
    link.href = canvas.toDataURL("image/x-icon");
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(link);
</script>

For currently outdated versions Internet Explorer (<9) one needs a workaround like Explorer Canvas. See the official instructions on how to do that.

Adding a favicon to a static HTML page

You can make a .png image and then use one of the following snippets between the <head> tags of your static HTML documents:

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon.png"/>
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://example.com/favicon.png"/>

Favicon Standard - 2022 - svg, ico, png and dimensions?

Disclaimer: I'm the author of RealFaviconGenerator, which I expect to be up-to-date (mostly, see below). So don't be surprised if this answer matches what RFG generates.

The one-size-fits-all myth

There is no "one size fits all" icon. You can't create a single SVG icon and expect it to work everywhere.

From a technical point of view, a single SVG icon would be a good thing. But from a UI and UX point of view, this is not a desirable outcome. Compare iOS and Android. On iOS, all home screen icons are squares with rounded corners (iOS fills transparent regions of Touch icons with black). On Android, home screen icons often use non-square shapes and transparency (including Google app icons). Submit a single touch icon and Android Chrome will use it. But you won't be able to match Android icon guidelines, whereas a dedicated icon could.

So I advice to deliberately avoid using a single icon. Rather target each platform individually, when possible (this is not always the case).

Icons, platform per platform

iOS Safari

iOS Safari expects a touch icon. As of today, this is a 180x180 PNG image. This image should not use transparency and its corners will be automatically rounded when added to home screen. Declared with:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/icons/apple-touch-icon.png">

Over the years, this icon has become the "default high resolution icon" for many browsers. So you will find it elsewhere, when adding to bookmark, etc.

Android Chrome

Android Chrome relies on the Web App Manifest. Although this manifest is not dedicated to Android Chrome, it is currently its main supporter. So at the moment, it is still quite safe to consider the icons from the Web App Manifest to be for Android Chrome.

As the name suggests, the Web App Manifest is for, well, web apps. But any web site can use it as a way to reference some icons.

Android expects a 192x192 PNG icon, transparency allowed and encouraged.

The manifest is declared with:

<link rel="manifest" href="/icons/site.webmanifest">

Edge and IE 12

Microsoft introduced the browserconfig, an XML document which lists various icons that fit the Metro UI.

The file and background color are declared with:

<meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#da532c">
<meta name="msapplication-config" content="/icons/browserconfig.xml">

Classic desktop browsers

Windows/macOS Chrome, Windows/macOS Firefox, Safari, IE... This is were things are a little more blurry. Historically, there was a single favicon.ico file, still supported. However, most recent browsers rather pick PNG icons, which are lighter. Plus some browsers are not able to select the proper icon in the ICO file (this format can embed several versions of an icon), leading a low resolution icon being wrongly used.

One could be tempted to drop the old favicon.ico entirely. Although I would like to make this leap in RFG, I didn't run the necessary tests to evaluate the impact on the old browsers.

Thus the combo I still recommend today, with favicon.ico embedding 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 icons:

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="/icons/favicon-32x32.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="16x16" href="/icons/favicon-16x16.png">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/icons/favicon.ico">

Other browsers

Other browsers may have dedicated icons. For example Coast by Opera is looking for a 228x228 icon. The need to focus on these browsers is not obvious. They usually use the touch icon or other icons when they cannot find "their" icon.

Conclusion

As announced at the beginning, this is exactly what RealFaviconGenerator creates.

How to create a favicon for Safari 14?

I solved it. So, instead of deleting files in ~Library/Safari/Favicon Cache, I had to empty the entire Safari cache from Develop menu or using this keyboard shortcut ⌥⌘E

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