The basic problem is that in order for custom site icons to be useful to the end user, you have to fetch favicon.ico. If you don't fetch favicon.ico, then the feature is essentially useless, since you won't get custom icons for any Web sites.
Of the Media Metrix top 500 sites, 45% have valid favicon responses, nearly all of which are valid favicons. The degree to which favicon.ico is already supported by the top sites on the Web should not be underestimated or ignored. To expect Mozilla representatives to be able to evangelize any significant percentage of these sites to use the <link> solution is IMO overly optimistic. Without supporting favicon.ico, the usefulness of the custom icon feature is zero. Dave ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Jonas J�rgensen wrote: > > Are you saying that because automatic favicon.ico fetching doesn't > affect me directly, I shouldn't care? The bombing of the World Trade > Center did not affect me directly since I didn't know anyone who was > there - should I not care about that either, then? > > You know, there _are_ people out there who are very annoyed by seeing > their ISP's icon on their pages, and who doesn't how to disable it. I've > seen complaints in support forums about it. So automatic favicon.ico > fetching *does create problems*. Turning it off would not do any harm, > since people who want it can add it manually with <link>. > > The question that remains is: Why? Why do we need to automatically > request a file called favicon.ico when no icon is specified? Why is that > any better than automatically requesting favbackg.gif when no background > is specified? >
