Correct MIME Type For Favicon.ico?


Answer :

When you're serving an .ico file to be used as a favicon, it doesn't matter. All major browsers recognize both mime types correctly. So you could put:



<!-- IE -->
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" />
<!-- other browsers -->
<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" />


or the same with image/vnd.microsoft.icon, and it will work with all browsers.



Note: There is no IANA specification for the MIME-type image/x-icon, so it does appear that it is a little more unofficial than image/vnd.microsoft.icon.



The only case in which there is a difference is if you were trying to use an .ico file in an <img> tag (which is pretty unusual).
Based on previous testing, some browsers would only display .ico files as images when they were served with the MIME-type image/x-icon. More recent tests show: Chromium, Firefox and Edge are fine with both content types, IE11 is not. If you can, just avoid using ico files as images, use png.



I think the root for this confusion is well explained in this wikipedia article.




While the IANA-registered MIME type for ICO files is
image/vnd.microsoft.icon, it was submitted to IANA in 2003 by a third
party and is not recognised by Microsoft software, which uses
image/x-icon instead.




If even the inventor of the ICO format does not use the official MIME type, I will use image/x-icon, too.



I have noticed that when using type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon", the favicon fails to appear when the browser is not connected to the internet.
But type="image/x-icon" works whether the browser can connect to the internet, or not.
When developing, at times I am not connected to the internet.



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