Inventing Favicon.ico (opens in new tab)

There's a video somewhere of Mark Zuckerberg and some co-workers discussing ideas about Facebook (in it's earliest days), and in the video they are trying to decide on what options should be available under the relationship field, one guy says something like: "I feel like we should make it possible to say that.. like you're not in a relationship per se, but nor are you free, like it's complicated..."

Back then the number of people involved in browser and web technology was small. Now, even the brightest mind will have any new idea critiqued and iterated by thousands of equally bright minds whether they like it or not.

It's probably too much to say that there are no new ideas in web browsers any more, but it's certainly harder to find them thanks to how collaborative the Internet has made the world (that's almost ironic)

This has some advantages over just blindly loading one file (no HTTP request if there's no image, though browsers still all try /favicon.ico nowadays) and you get to chose where to place the icon (probably together with other images of your site).

I think by now all browsers support <link rel="shortcut icon"> but all of them still request /favicon.ico so by adding that you a) don't have to change your markup for the icon and b) you silence the error log of your web server - all in one go.

I've written stuff that handled the ICO format; it's simpler and easier to load than PNG/GIF/JPG (unless you already have libraries for the latter, of course - which wasn't a given in browsers at the time). I don't think their choice was wrong at all, especially since ICO loading was at the time built into the OS, so any Windows browser that wanted to load favicons didn't even have to build their own loader.

EDIT: Plus, if you're complaining about 'favicon.ico', it's no worse than robots.txt. At the time the modern 'link rel="icon"' approach was definitely not in common use so it's no wonder nobody at MS chose it, and people probably would have complained loudly about MS introducing 'some proprietary icon HTML'.

Another reason ICO is good as a favicon format is that it makes it impossible for site authors to accidentally use a 500KB image file as their icon (which you could trivially do with png, gif, jpg, etc.) - ICO is intentionally a file format for small images, tailor-made for what icons were like in that era. So by relying on ICO they ensured that the favicon.ico on each site would be small, cheap to download, easy to cache, and easy to author.

Of all the pain and suffering that Microsoft programmers have caused the rest of the world, favicons have got to be near the bottom of the list.