Do I need to have a favicon on my site? How do I get rid of the errors I see in my apache log?

Question

I keep seeing favicon warnings in my apache log. How do I get rid of those? Do I have to have a favicon for my site?

Answer 1

/favicon.ico is one of the artifacts of the Browser Dark Ages (cca 2000). While there is no way to prevent the browser requests, creating a 0-byte file named favicon.ico ends the flow of 404 errors (as the file exists), but no favicon will be shown by the browsers for your site.