A favicon is that stylish little icon that is displayed in your browser's address bar next to the website url (See the sample picture on the right).

If you're wondering where the name came from then its short for "Favourites Icon". Its called that because if your visitors add your website to their "Favourites" (bookmark your site) then it will also shows up on their list making your site stand out that little bit more.

Many web browsers these days can handle favicons which then may be displayed the browser's URL bar, next to the website's name in lists of bookmarks and next to the page's title in the browser's tab. I.e. Firefox, Netscape or IE7.

The original means of defining a favicon was by placing a file called favicon.ico in the root directory of a webserver. This would then automatically be used in Internet Explorer's favorites (bookmarks) display. Later, however, a more flexible system was created, using (X)HTML to indicate the location of an icon for any given page. This is achieved by adding two link elements in the section of the document as detailed below. In this way, any appropriately sized (16×16 pixels or larger) image can be used, and although many still use the ICO format, other browsers now also support the animated GIF and PNG image formats.