Favicons in the 21st century

by mark | 12 May 2022, 8:49 p.m.

Long ago, when Netscape 4 and IRIX were still relevant, I had a dumb website that had a Favourites Icon. The wee image you see in tabs or favourites. Back in those halcyon days you used a program to make a Windows icon file, call it favicon.ico, and dump it in the root directory of your website. 

Ha. 

These days that still works but the low res Windows 3.0 file icons look bad essentially everywhere. Plus now every device has several zillion custom icons it looks for. And a JSON file it can use to discover icons. 

This isn't really too bad to deal with. Apple devices look for a apple-touch-icon relation (180x180px). Other platforms look for a range of size options which you specify as icon relations. The old school favicon.ico can be put in (outside of root as a relation). Finally the JSON file can be put in. 

Phew. 

I used the sunshine emoji as the base for this, generated using a helpful emoji to favicon webapp with the graphics done by Twemoji (part of Twitter). Thanks, Elon!