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IE 8 (on Win 7 64 bit) can get the fav icon (the tiny icon to the left of the address and which will show to the left of the bookmark if you add that link to the link bar of IE 8).

For example, the Wikipedia, Answers.com, and Facebook favicon can all be obtained, but it just cannot get the one for Restaurant City http://apps.facebook.com/restaurantcity no matter how I tried. (it happened on 2 machines) Chrome and FF both can get it. Is there a way I can make IE 8 get it too?

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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

The site you are referring to has the current reference in the html head:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://photos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-sf2p/v43/96/43016202276/app_2_43016202276_3195.gif" />

It should have a reference to a .ico file as well in order to work well on all browsers.

More information on favicons can be found on wikipedia.

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up vote 1 down vote

The Restaurant City favicon is possibly not showing in IE8 because it uses a GIF image without specifying the MIME type.

i.e. it has: 

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/app_2_43016202276_3195.gif" />

rather than: 

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/app_2_43016202276_3195.gif" type="image/gif" />

Correction

Just tried this and type="image/gif" made no difference.

I suspect that in this case, since Facebook already has a favicon defines for the site root, this interferes with the one set (using a GIF) in the subdirectory.

When I converted the GIF to an ICO file and used the standard 

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/testicon.ico" />

it worked fine.

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up vote 0 down vote

Sometimes favicons can be 'refreshed' by clearing your cache/internet history. Also, try pressing CTRL + F5 to force a full refresh of the page.

Also, it is difficult to test your problem when the site you link to requires a login (I don't have an account there). Do you have any other examples?

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up vote 0 down vote

Some programmers know how to properly add a favicon, others are working on old/incorrect information.

Some browsers will try to compensate for the programmers that just aren't doing it right and will try to fetch the favicon via other means, but IMHO this is only encouraging bad behaviour.

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there is also a philosophy: do it as the world really is. don't do it assuming it must be a perfect world. – 動靜能量 Oct 27 '09 at 20:11
The browser makers (mostly) follow (or at least try to follow) published standards. Sadly, its the same programmers who fuss over browsers that don't follow standards that tend to also fuss over browsers not doing what they meant instead of what they said. You should not expect the browser to deal with non-standard behaviour. – AnonJr Oct 27 '09 at 20:58
i find that in the non-standard or the standard-variant world, there is really no need to argue. It really depends on: does IE 8 need to adapt to the Internet world as it is, or does the Internet need to adapt to IE. – 動靜能量 Oct 27 '09 at 21:10
If the internet adapts to IE, I stop developing. – Phoshi Oct 27 '09 at 22:28
1  
Sadly, this is one of the areas where IE is following the W3C - and its one of the areas where they frequently get slammed for not doing what people expect. Go figure. – AnonJr Oct 28 '09 at 11:09
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