How to prevent favicon ico requests

Question

I don t have a favicon ico  but my browser always makes a request for it  Is it possible to prevent the browser from making a request for the favicon from my site  Maybe some META-TAG in the HTML header

User · Answer

You can use  htaccess or server directives to deny access to favicon ico  but the server will send an access denied reply to the browser and this still slows page access   You can stop the browser requesting favicon ico when a user returns to your site  by getting it to stay in the browser cache   First  provide a small favicon ico image  could be blank  but as small as possible  I made a black and white one under 200 bytes  Then  using  htaccess or server directives  set the file Expires header a month or two in the future  When the same user comes back to your site it will be loaded from the browser cache and no request will go to your site  No more 404 s in the server logs too   If you have control over a complete Apache server or maybe a virtual server you can do this -  If the server document root is say  var www html then add this to  etc httpd conf httpd conf -  Alias  favicon ico   var www html favicon ico   lt Directory   var www html  gt       lt Files favicon ico gt         ExpiresActive On        ExpiresDefault  access plus 1 month       lt  Files gt   lt  Directory gt    Then a single favicon ico will work for all the virtual hosted sites since you are aliasing it  It will be drawn from the browser cache for a month after the users visit   For  htaccess this is reported to work  not checked by me  -  AddType image x-icon  ico ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image x-icon  access plus 1 month

User · Answer

Just add the following line to the  lt head gt  section of your HTML file    lt link rel  icon  href  data    gt    Features of this solution    100  valid HTML5 very short does not incur any quirks from IE 8 and older does not make the browser interpret the current HTML code as favicon  which would be the case with href

User · Answer

In our experience  with Apache falling over on request of favicon ico  we commented out extra headers in the  htaccess file   For example we had Header set X-XSS-Protection  1  mode block       but we had forgotten to sudo a2enmod headers beforehand   Commenting out extra headers being sent resolved our favicon ico issue   We also had several virtual hosts set up for development  and only failed out with 500 Internal Server Error when using http   localhost and fetching  favicon ico   If you run  curl -v http   localhost favicon ico  and get a warning about the host name not being in the resolver cache or something to that effect  you might experience problems   It could be as simple as not fetching  we tried that and it didn t work  because our root cause was different  or look around for directives in apache2 conf or  htaccess which might be causing strange 500 Internal Server Error messages   We found it failed so quickly there was nothing useful in Apache s error logs whatsoever and spent an entire morning changing small things here and there until we resolved the problem of setting extra headers when we had forgotten to have mod headers loaded

User · Answer

I will first say that having a favicon in a Web page is a good thing  normally   However it is not always desired and sometime developers need a way to avoid the extra payload  For example an IFRAME would request a favicon without showing it  Worst yet  in Chrome and Android an IFRAME will generate 3 requests for favicons   quot GET  favicon ico HTTP 1 1 quot  404 183  quot GET  apple-touch-icon-precomposed png HTTP 1 1 quot  404 197  quot GET  apple-touch-icon png HTTP 1 1 quot  404 189  The following uses data URI and can be used to avoid fake favicon requests   lt link rel  quot shortcut icon quot  href  quot data image x-icon   quot  type  quot image x-icon quot  gt    For references see here   https   github com h5bp html5-boilerplate issues 1103 https   twitter com diegoperini status 4882543836930048  UPDATE 1  From the comments  jpic  it looks like Firefox  gt   25 doesn t like the above syntax anymore  I tested on Firefox 27 and it doesn t work while it still work on Webkit Chrome  So here is the new one that should cover all recent browsers  I tested Safari  Chrome and Firefox   lt link rel  quot icon quot  href  quot data  base64   quot  gt   I left out the  quot shortcut quot  name from the  quot rel quot  attribute value since that s only for older IE and versions of IE  lt  8 doesn t like dataURIs either  Not tested on IE8  UPDATE 2  If you need your document to validate against HTML5 use this instead   lt link rel  quot icon quot  href  quot data  base64 iVBORw0KGgo  quot  gt

User · Answer

In Node js   res writeHead 200    Content-Type     text plain    Link    rel  shortcut icon  href

User · Answer

Sometimes this error comes  when HTML has some commented code and browser is trying to look for something  Like in my case I had commented code for a web form in flask and I was getting this   After spending 2 hours I fixed it in the following ways   1  I created a new python environment and then it threw an error on the commented HTML line  before this I was only thrown error  GET  favicon ico HTTP 1 1  404   2  Sometimes  when I had a duplicate code  like python file existing with the same name  then also I saw this error  try removing those too

User · Answer

You can t  All you can do is to make that image as small as possible and set some cache invalidation headers  Expires  Cache-Control  far in the future  Here s what Yahoo  has to say about favicon ico requests

User · Answer

Personally I used this in my HTML head tag   lt link rel  quot shortcut icon quot  href  quot   quot    gt

User · Answer

You could use   lt link rel  shortcut icon  href  http   localhost     gt    That way it won t actually be requested from the server

User · Answer

A very simple solution is put the below code in your  htaccess  I had the same issue and it solve my problem    lt IfModule mod alias c gt      RedirectMatch 403 favicon ico  lt  IfModule gt    Reference  http   perishablepress com block-favicon-url-404-requests

User · Answer

if you use nginx     skip favicon ico   location    favicon ico       access log off      return 204

User · Answer

I believe I ve seen this  I haven t tested it or used it personally though     lt link rel  shortcut icon  href       gt    Anyone had similar experience   EDIT   I just tested the above snippet and on a forced full refresh  no favicon requests were seen in Fiddler  I tested against IE8  Compat mode as IE7 standards  and FF 3 6

User · Answer

The easiest way to block these temporarily for testing purposes is to open up the inspect page in chrome by right-clicking anywhere on the page and clicking inspect or by pressing Ctrl Shift j and then going to the networking tab and then reloading the page which will send all the requests your page is supposed to make including that annoying favicon ico  You can now simply right click the favicon ico request and click  quot Block request URL quot    All of the above answers are for devs who control the app source code  If you are a sysadmin  who s figuring our load-balancer or proxying configuration and is annoyed by this favicon ico shenanigans  this simple trick does a better job  This answer is for Chrome  but I think there should be a similar alternative which you would figure out for Firefox Opera Tor any other browser

[favicon] How to prevent favicon.ico requests?

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