Although Firefox is a great browser that protects users from pop-ups, spyware and should replace IE it does have a big issue.

favicon.ico

Firefox by default wont find favicon.ico by reading a HTML/XHTML document and looking for a <link rel> pointing towards it, instead it will play a guessing game and think that its located in the same folder as the document being requested. The result? My error log files are getting too fucking built up with firefox browsers crawling for a file that isnt there. Now at first thats not a big problem, but when my weekly log files show 250,000 requests average, the 404 error requests for favicon.ico are a bit too much, especially when im checking logs for REAL errors.

So, here is my solution.

• Firefox ONLY grabs or uses favicon.ico IF a HTML/XHTML whatever document that it can read contains the appropriate tag to link to the file. If it cannot find this link, it does not attempt to find it through its own devices.

• As an extension, instead of replacing it with just 1 default icon, use a range or set of icons that change depending on what MIME type the content in that tab is. This means that themes get extended functionality. So for instance images get their own icon set, or hell, it could be setup so that obscure MIME types even get their own icon, pending on the creators want.

The result? Not a significant reduction with user interaction, but it saves site admins like me having to cull out favicon 404 errors. I should not have to have an ico file in EVERY FOLDER, or clean out my error logs constantly as a result of letting firefox users view my sites.

Anyone got thoughts about this? If I get around to it, I may just suggest this to Mozilla or someone who cares.