I have had a couple of emails regarding the new favicon on the site. If you view this site in FireFox (and a fair old 14% of you do) then you’ll notice the animation. If you are using any kind of IE, then you will not notice anything. Rumour has it that newer version of Opera and Safari also do this, but not on the iPhone.

Back in the good old days, you had to have a favicon.ico file in the root of your website and all was well. Then people wanted to host multiple sites and the shortcut link HTML entity was introduced. Now with advances in modern browsers some have taken to supporting animated gif files as well. The difference is the ‘type’ specifier.

The original version looked like this

<link rel='shortcut icon' href='favicon.ico' type='image/x-icon' />

Now, we can use the following syntax

<link rel='shortcut icon' href='favicon.gif' type='image/gif' />

If you use this with IE though, dragging the shortcut to your desktop makes it appear very badly. You’ll probably want to do some form of browser detect and compensate for the IE lacking by providing the original version again :)