Information Gift

Faviconic Revisited

The Favicon Support Chart has been updated to reflect changes in newer versions of Safari and AOL along with needed corrections due to an improperly formed multi-res favicon. Check it out and let me know what you think.

A couple things brought me back to the Favicon Support Chart this week. The first was a Bugzilla update on a Webkit favicon-related bug I had filed some time ago, and the second was a feature I discovered in Leopard's updated Preview application; exploring the first while leveraging the second exposed a problem in my original tests.

Turns out the multi-res favicon I had created was flawed, invalidating some of the multi-res results. I exposed this problem when I decided on a whim to try and load the favicon into Preview, which can display all the icons at their assigned bit-depths.

Doing so, I noticed that Iconographer had saved the 32-bit icon over the 8-bit, and nothing I could do with the editor seemed to succeed in making an 8-bit icon "stick". Iconographer no longer appears to be in development, but I remembered noting a favicon Photoshop plug-in in the original favicon entry and decided to try Telegraphic's ICOFormat and ICOBundle. ICOFormat is a donationware plug-in for all versions of Photoshop which extracts, edits and saves individual favicons, and ICOBundle is a free drag and drop utility that combines individual favicons into a single multi-res version. Both are cross-platform [mac/win], released under the GPL, and rock.

The screengrab animation below shows Leopard's Preview displaying the corrected multi-res favicon.

The now properly formed multi-res favicon behaved differently in some of the browsers that previously exhibited issues; re-testing followed and I believe the latest version of the chart is better for it.

Hope some of you find this useful. For more in-depth favicon information, check out the original entry: Faviconic.