How can I get a web site's favicon?

Question

Simple enough question: I\'ve created a small app that is basically just a favourites that sits in my system tray so that I can open often-used sites/folders/files from the

Answer 1

This is a late answer, but for completeness: it is difficult to get even close to fetching 90% all favicons.

A while ago I wrote a WordPress plugin which attempts to get closer to 100%.

This is how it works:

1. It starts by searching existing favicon repositories such as Google favicons and GetFavicons for the favicon.

2. If none of them returns an icon, the plugin attempts to get the icon itself. This involves traversing several pages on the domain.

3. The plugin then inspects the physical image file, because on some servers files get returned with the incorrect mime types.

The code is still not perfect because in the details you will find many weird situations: people have wrongly coded paths, e.g. img/favicon.ico where img is not in the root, duplicate headers in HTML output, different server responses from the head and body etc.

The core of the fetching part is here so you can reverse-engineer it, but be aware that validating the response should be done (checking image filetype, mime etc.).

Answer 2

You'll want to tackle this a few ways:

1. Look for the favicon.ico at the root of the domain

   www.domain.com/favicon.ico

2. Look for a <link> tag with the rel="shortcut icon" attribute

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

3. Look for a <link> tag with the rel="icon" attribute

   <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.png" />

The latter two will usually yield a higher quality image.

---

Just to cover all of the bases, there are device specific icon files that might yield higher quality images since these devices usually have larger icons on the device than a browser would need:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="images/touch.png" />

<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="images/touch.png" />

---

And to download the icon without caring what the icon is you can use a utility like http://www.google.com/s2/favicons which will do all of the heavy lifting:

var client = new System.Net.WebClient();

client.DownloadFile(
    @"http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=stackoverflow.com",
    "stackoverflow.com.ico");