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Dynamic Favicons
softwareas.com — Michael Mahemoff has posted an interesting idea concerning other uses for the “favicon” supported by browsers these days. He has worked up a library to work with this overlooked little feature, and includes some samples to show how it works.
bonlebon- 947 diggs
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- sunny3, on 10/12/2007, -17/+4Cool...
- teh_toaster, on 10/12/2007, -7/+5And it will go go completely ignored by IE users... oh, well. No worries from me.
- MugatuOT, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10So does Safari but I guess bashing that is not as cool as bashing IE.
- Zonkzor, on 10/12/2007, -16/+13I just realized today that (at least in firefox) this image can be animated. This would make it much more useful as a notification feature for something like Gmail.
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http://CollegeCheapskate.com- LewsTherin, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Stop modding up spam comments
- Zonkzor, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2It's not spam if the signature is attached to a worthwhile post. People who add a sig to worthless posts like "that was cool" don't deserve it.
- Battlecry, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2That's pretty nifty... Don't know how useful it is, but nifty nonetheless.
- l0ne, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Does not work on the latest Safari. Uff, bugreport.apple.com time.
- zonemen, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1That is really cool.
- VaporBro, on 10/26/2007, -8/+1Nifty, cool, and rad...but what exactly could I use it for...
- Shrill, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Not a bad idea, however unless it can be universally implemented (across the browsers) it's unlikely to become any sort of standard. Now I think about it you can probably do this with AJAX anyway just overlay a status indicator somewhere on the page and have it update an animated gif or something - there is no specific advantage of having it in the location bar, except it being a little cooler :)
- dreaz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I think the main idea here is to appear on the firefox tabs, so you can leave any site open on a tab and know when something happened just by looking at the favicon. I know I'd love this on gmail. Perhaps someone could use the greasemonkey tutorial up there to do it?
- Oniony, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Not strictly true. In some browsers (such as IE6) the icon is also used as the window icon. In Firefox, the favicon and the title bar text are the only ways a background tab indicate that something has happened (such as new mail arriving) without doing something irritating like popping up a window or making a sound.
This technique is the closest we can get to the Windows system tray (taskbar notification area) in terms of purpose: to passively convey an event or state change. - navvvv, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@dreaz
gmail shows the number of unread messages in the title, which is very useful.
- navvvv, on 10/12/2007, -14/+8rubbish, just a new way to annoy your user.
- rhyno2000, on 10/12/2007, -11/+7Exactly. Like a cutesy little <BLINK> tag.
And not worth spending 2 seconds creating, as they won't be seen by 80-90% of your audience.
- rhyno2000, on 10/12/2007, -11/+7Exactly. Like a cutesy little <BLINK> tag.
- bat-21, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I have seen one website - http://forums.minidisc.org/ - use a dynamic favicon. I don't think they're using the same coding because the transitions are different.
- twojs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2it's just an animated gif, no code in that.
http://forums.minidisc.org/favicon.ico
- twojs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2it's just an animated gif, no code in that.
- xmuskrat, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4I smell something that can be misused...
- xmuskrat, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Could this be used to spoof the favicon so it appears as a blue circle instead of an orange one? SO it looks like the URL was not changed?
- demiurg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Could be another trick to bring at least minor interest to sites with no content but full of javascript snow, java applets, blinking text, etc.
- brandonhines, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2Why does he require you to e-mail him for the IE and Safari versions? What's up with that?
- alphamerik, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Either you have no critical reading skills or english is not your first language.
FTFA: [IE and Safari don't work]... *If you know of a way* their icons could be dynamically manipulated, please mail me or add a comment here.
- alphamerik, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Either you have no critical reading skills or english is not your first language.
- WillyWonka, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Just slap an animated gif there ant it will work in Firefox at least (IE falls back to the ico)
eg, MozillaNews.org http://mozillanews.org/index.php3
For the record I find this HIGHLY distracting when trying to read the content on the page, so I wouldn't do it. - F1R3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Used tastefully like everything else this would be a nice feature, such as for notifying people something happened in another tab in FF, a status indicator, or you could dynamically have a morning day and night icon.
Its not really all that complicated, and some users will get use out of it.. that is if you have anything actually happen on your page while the user is looking at it..
Putting a flashing animated icon or something there though is IMO a very annoying idea. - dudinatrix, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1But I use Internet Explorer.
/sarcasm (do I need to even say that?) - tablatronix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Id love to see this universally implemented for tabbed browsers. Ever since i used tabbed browsers i thought it would be a helpful feature.
Nice to see someone attempting it. - thewhitefedora, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Interesting
- bobbyzooka, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0yeah, agreed about the tabbed browsers. wish i had it now
- clintonthegeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Works great in Konqueror in KDE 3.5.1 as well!
- cakefart, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2For the love of delicious wonderful spam, please let this idea die before it is implemented widely.
The last thing I need is more blinking flashing detritus on web pages, and a set of plug-ins to get rid of it. (e.g. flashblock)
I can see how this would be incredibly useful for pointing out data and alerts on asynch (AJAX) request designed pages, but like everything else like it since NSFNet went public, it'll wind up being subverted into annoying noise.- ljdarten, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Amen. Everytime something new and interesting comes out (like flash and others) it's really neat for a little bit until the advertisers find a way to make it irritate us.
- MedicineMan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I first noticed these newfangled "animated favicon icons" all of three days ago at
http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.myspace.com - abstractia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Interesting.
Unfortunately, Safari has even more problems with favicons. Even if you could dynamically change the favicon.ico file, Safari caches favicons, and even using the "Reset Safari" or "Clear Cache" function won't release favicons from cache. You actually have to go into terminal and remove the favicon cache manually.- mahemoff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well, the main point is not the animation aspect but for things like chat, where you want to notify in a background tab. Saying that, it seems kind of appropriate for me to add a little JS animation on my blog and AjaxPatterns, so watch out for that once the library's a bit more fleshed out.
- matriculated, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's funny how he doesn't use the technique on the page....
- RobLoach, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0A Favicon is what users use to distinguish your site from others, graphically. Those 16x16 pixels are a trademark and a representation of your site. Changing it doesn't help as they then have to remember a new graphic. Not only that, this only works on a selected few browsers. Not very practical, if you ask me. Content is the way to get visiters, not changing your favicon.
- DrColossos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0indeed, a good point here. think it is too confusing to have new favicon in your bookmarks all the time
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