Favicon History

Favicon is short for Favorites Icon and thats where it got its name. Favicon was invented by Microsoft. All Internet Explorers from version 5 and above are capable of showing favicon. IE 5 and above, first look if there is a favicon.ico file located in the root folder of any website.

If there is "favicon icon" in there, it will be displayed when visitors add website to favorites. Soon all other Web Browsers (Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror) enabled Favicon.ico files.

Did you know?

There was an interesting side effect of favicon in early version of Internet Explorer. Since favicon.icon was only downloaded when a site was added to Favorites, website owners could know exactly how many people bookmarked their website. However, with newer versions of Internet Explorer this is no longer relevant.