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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