IE7 inconsistently showing favicons? | The Coffeehouse

Escamillo

I recently upgraded to IE7 on my main PC, and am seeing that IE7 isn't showing favicons in the address bar or tabs with any consistency. Sometimes they're shown, sometimes not, depending on the site.

I've also observed that if I navigate to a site for which the favicon isn't shown, then quit and restart IE7, and navigate to the site again, then the favicon *is* shown.

Does anyone have an idea of what the problem is and how it can be fixed?

(BTW, I had IE7 beta 2, beta 3, RC1, and RTM on my test PC, and had no problems regarding favicons. This is just happenning on my main PC.)

joem83
Heading toward the future. IE8, Vista, Office12, Zune 2.0

Strangly I just started to see this happen, but it could be the fact that I have set the history to never save.

Escamillo wrote:
I recently upgraded to IE7 on my main PC, and am seeing that IE7 isn't showing favicons in the address bar or tabs with any consistency. Sometimes they're shown, sometimes not, depending on the site.

I've also observed that if I navigate to a site for which the favicon isn't shown, then quit and restart IE7, and navigate to the site again, then the favicon *is* shown.

Does anyone have an idea of what the problem is and how it can be fixed?

(BTW, I had IE7 beta 2, beta 3, RC1, and RTM on my test PC, and had no problems regarding favicons. This is just happenning on my main PC.)

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

I have the same issue. Although much improved, IE's favicon implementation remains fundamentally broken.

BruceMorgan

Sven Groot wrote:
I have the same issue. Although much improved, IE's favicon implementation remains fundamentally broken.

Sorry, I'm going to disagree with that last statement.

We fundamentally re-wrote how favicons work, how they are stored, the algorithm for downloading them, etc. We have a number of test cases and went through 3 betas with that code, fixing fewer issues with each beta and nothing after RC1.

We've had a few reports of issues post RTM and they've all been by design (favicon respects the no-cache header, for instance, and doesn't support PNG favicons).

Give me a repro - site, behavior, settings.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Even if it's completely different if it doesn't work right it's still broken.

BruceMorgan wrote:
Give me a repro - site, behavior, settings.

Channel9, or any site really. If I have IE open for an extended time the favicons just start disappearing from the title bar and tabs. Open a new instance and the issue is gone again. I've seen this happen on fairly vanilla installations too.

I know how annoying this type of bug is since there's no clear repro. There's nothing I do to make the icons disappear; it just happens. But that doesn't change the fact that that is the case.

BruceMorgan

Sven Groot wrote:
Even if it's completely different if it doesn't work right it's still broken.

I object to your extrapolation that your problem means favicons are still "fundamentally broken". From my point of view, that's not justified by the evidence. There are many ways to have one-off bugs, things that work for a million machines but break on one. Favicons have not generated the scope of reports necessary for me to agree "yes, it's fundamentally broken". IE6 favicons were fundamentally broken.

So the feature has a problem that you can reproduce, so we need to figure out why you can demonstrate a problem and (many / most) others cannot.

Could be a third party (it often is), could be some code problem with IE. For example, one senior Microsoft exec couldn't drag-and-drop favorites around in Favorites Center but could in Organize Favorites. It turned out to be caused by a particular Explorer extension for his Thinkpad's CD burning software.

So as always, run in Add-ons Disabled mode, check what BHOs are loaded, etc. And as always, some things glom onto IE in ways Add-ons Disabled mode can't turn off, so even that doesn't guarantee no 3rd party code is running.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

BruceMorgan wrote:

Sven Groot wrote: Even if it's completely different if it doesn't work right it's still broken.

I object to your extrapolation that your problem means favicons are still "fundamentally broken". From my point of view, that's not justified by the evidence.

Look at it from my point of view. In IE6, favicons usually didn't work at all due to the TIF issue. Now I move to IE7 and it's indeed much better. But I still see randomly vanishing favicons on four different computers and even more installations.

It might be an add-on, but the problem in determining that is that it can take hours of usage for this problem to show up and some days it doesn't happen at all. If I run without add-ons, at what point do I know the symptoms are cured? I need most of my add-ons, I can't go running in no add-ons mode for weeks. (this reminds of a long time ago (more than a decade at least) on a campsite in france where they had a racing arcade game that was broken, but the symptoms only appeared after it had been on for about an hour. The techs would come to fix it, prod around with the connectors a bit, test it, conclude it works and leave. Then an hour later it was broken again. This cycle repeated a few dozen times, and then I left so I never knew if they ever actually fixed it).

BruceMorgan

Sven Groot wrote:

BruceMorgan wrote:

Sven Groot wrote: Even if it's completely different if it doesn't work right it's still broken.

I object to your extrapolation that your problem means favicons are still "fundamentally broken". From my point of view, that's not justified by the evidence.

Look at it from my point of view. In IE6, favicons usually didn't work at all due to the TIF issue. Now I move to IE7 and it's indeed much better. But I still see randomly vanishing favicons on four different computers and even more installations.

It might be an add-on, but the problem in determining that is that it can take hours of usage for this problem to show up and some days it doesn't happen at all. If I run without add-ons, at what point do I know the symptoms are cured? I need most of my add-ons, I can't go running in no add-ons mode for weeks.

We run IE for hours / days at a time in various stress tests, and I don't recall that we encountered this issue. We don't run stress with a variety of add-ons, though.

If you could send me your list of installed add-ons, then we may be able to reproduce this in-house.

LaBomba
Summer

why cant you support png?

Escamillo

BruceMorgan wrote:

Sven Groot wrote: I have the same issue. Although much improved, IE's favicon implementation remains fundamentally broken.
Sorry, I'm going to disagree with that last statement.

We fundamentally re-wrote how favicons work, how they are stored, the algorithm for downloading them, etc. We have a number of test cases and went through 3 betas with that code, fixing fewer issues with each beta and nothing after RC1.

We've had a few reports of issues post RTM and they've all been by design (favicon respects the no-cache header, for instance, and doesn't support PNG favicons).

Give me a repro - site, behavior, settings.

Bruce, is there some way to clear the favicon cache (wherever it is) to force IE7 to start from a clean state?

JChung2006

Maybe the "favicon" images are just leaving your cache? You would be surprised how quickly a browser cache fills up, especially if your Internet connection is broadband or better.

TimP

At the moment, I have eight tabs open. Seven have the correct favicons and YouTube doesn't. Doing a refresh (F5) doesn't fix it, Ctrl-F5 doesn't either. I tried re-opening it in a new tab and it still didn't work. Only after starting a new IE7 instance did the favicon return.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

Sven Groot wrote:
Even if it's completely different if it doesn't work right it's still broken.

BruceMorgan wrote: Give me a repro - site, behavior, settings.

Channel9, or any site really. If I have IE open for an extended time the favicons just start disappearing from the title bar and tabs. Open a new instance and the issue is gone again. I've seen this happen on fairly vanilla installations too.

I know how annoying this type of bug is since there's no clear repro. There's nothing I do to make the icons disappear; it just happens. But that doesn't change the fact that that is the case.

I have seen that too... Even in RTM. After quite a time the icons just disappear. I have no addon installed (other then flash and the one that came with the IE7 installation). I'm running it on Vista RTM.

One thing that was a little bit weird is that Adam changed the favicon of C9 and I needed to clear the cache before IE7 noticed the change... I'm often here and after a day the favicon was still the old, which made me to clear the whole IE cache.

Blank

Yep, favicons in IE7 are definitely a mess.

Sometimes they disappear at random, sometimes they get replaced by the wrong icons. I can visit a site and that site's favicon will overwrite the icon for a completely unrelated link in my favorites folder.

Another annoying icon issue in IE7 is the one where IE7 HTML document icons are placed on top of any icons on a CD you insert, you see the CD file icons peeking out from behind the IE7 ones.

These are all beta issues I expected to go away in the RTM, but no. I've got two machines running XP Pro (one with a US English version and US-EN IE7, the other with a Swedish XP edition and Swedish IE7).

And no, I don't have any IE "add-ons", everything's factory default here.

jamie

i jsut re-loaded xp from scratch and after adding all the sites i visit to the links bar - ones with icons - ( cbc, cnn, slashdot, news.com etc) are now - after one hour - all replaced with the default IE page icon.

CannotResolveSymbol
{insert caption here}

Favicons in IE7 are stored in an alternate data stream in the favorites shortcuts themselves (specifically, favorite.url:favicon). I can't think of any reason why IE should be arbitrarily deleting them: they aren't in the browser cache.

nickrg12

Sorry Bruce but the favicons have been driving me mad too. I'm in IE7 and have a proper ico not a renamed gif or anything like that. My browser shows the icons of just about every site I go to for the first time but for sites I visit regularly including my own sites the favicon has vanished.

When I type in mysite/favicon.ico it appears so I presume that means that there is nothing wrong with the icon file itself. Sounds like a caching thing but I can't work out how to resolve it. Any ideas?

Nick

arnet
Arne T

I have been bugged by similar intermittent problems with favicon problems (some missing, some wrong). It seems to only affect sites I have been to before. I have found the following fixed it for me ...

1) Delete history (from Internet Options)
2) Delete temporary internet files (also in Internet Options)

If the above doesn't work first time, you may need to close and re-open Internet Explorer.

FYI I am running IE7 on XP Home. But I think the above should work for other combinations of IE and Windows.

Please let me know if this works for you too! If it does, I hope that Microsoft will look into this and patch this as it is REALLY ANNOYING!

Good luck!

Arne T
UK

ionix5891

actually i noticed the same issue happening from time to time

the favicon displayed sometimes ends up being for another site

this is very confusing sometimes especially when you try do on line banking and ebay icon or some other site is show! lol

Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)

It's actually quite funny.
It depends on the type of linkage of the icon.
It is always shown if embedded via link tag into a site
It is sometimes shown if it's not linked and the favicon.ico file in the domain root
And it is sometimes shown, if it contains icon types greater than 32x32 True color, or the icon file is large than 128KB
it is never shown if the icon contains png compressed icon types (vista), as also if it is a renamed cursor (for animation)

weird stuff going on, though... Perplexed

But does it really matter?

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

Sometimes, no favicon shows for a site. Sometimes, it does.

Also, i have experienced IE 7 using the wrong icon for the wrong site. Pretty weird stuff.

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop
Seven of Niner! Resistance is Futile!

I saw that too, IE7 shows wrong favicons or doesn't show them at all both on XP and Vista

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

I disagree with you Bruce. Check this picture out:

http://peecee.dk/uploads/032008/Favicon.jpg

The icon on the first tab is the one for the second tab.
The second tabs icon is not related at all.
The third one is for the first one.

That is very much inconsistent to me.

lovebes

Her's the answer to make IE7 show favicons.
If you put any of these lines:
<link rel="icon" href="http://www.ogplanet.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"/>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.ogplanet.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"/>

THEY HAVE TO BE PUT BEFORE any <META> and RIGHT AFTER <HTML>!!

Took me couple hours to find out. Thanks!

BHpaddock

In reply to Chadk

#Feb 9th, 2008 @ 5:46 AM

Yeah I see that problem fairly often, so often (across all my machines) that I just took it for granted as an oddity in IE 7.

I haven't taken particular notice if it still happens on my IE 8 builds though (since I've been all win7 for quite a while now, I'm also all IE 8). Hopefully I haven't noticed because it's been fixed Smiley