Comments on: Webmasters: Make Your Favicon Transparent

By: hdh

hdh — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:04:03 +0000

Opera is ahead of the curve in supporting SVG in and CSS, but still doesn’t support SVG favicon. And HTML5 defines a fallback mechanism for multiple favicons.

By: Bill Gianopoulos

Bill Gianopoulos — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:56:35 +0000

Well, Firefox has just made it almost impossible to use a transparent background icon for you website because it can display against either a white blue grey tan green or blue background depending on which browser or level of security your ssl certificate conveys. I have just reverted from using a transparent background to using a white background for my favicon because of his issue. I sure hope they see the light hope they fix this before the actual release.

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:06:05 +0000

@Aleksej: I’ve got to disagree in a sense. Most websites want their websites to look good in all browsers. Adding the feature is great. Using it, is another story. Hopefully IE will eventually cave and add SVG support (then Firefox will just be ahead of the curve).

By: Neil

Neil — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:20:37 +0000

I’ve always used a transparent favicon.

In fact, it’s completely transparent!

By: Aleksej

Aleksej — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:54:28 +0000

@Robert: you know, there is no point in discarding feature requests just because IE doesn’t support the feature yet.

By: Aaron Strontsman

Aaron Strontsman — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:17:13 +0000

To add to Bill Gianapoulos’s comment: another common place where favicons are on a dark Grey background is in Songbird’s standard skin. A light border can work, but I guess that sometimes it looks cheaper than a white background.

PS: In Gimp, you can use Layer > Transparency > Color to Transpancy (sry, if that is not the exact naming of the menu items, I’m using a localized version of Gimp), you can then save the icon as .ico file, since this is a natively supported image format. For multiple sizes and color depths, just use multiple layers.

By: foxiewire.com

foxiewire.com — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 17:53:13 +0000

Webmasters: Make Your Favicon Transparent…

There are still quite a few websites that use a Favicon on a white background. While this looked OK in older browsers, these day with browsers like Firefox 3.0, they don’t look so great. It’s about time to make them transparent….

By: Robert

Robert — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 13:54:31 +0000

@Aleksej: Last I checked IE didn’t support SVG, so you’ll run into a problem there.

By: Bill Gianopoulos

Bill Gianopoulos — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 13:52:52 +0000

The common place where the favicon displays against a black background is on the bookmarks toolbar if you are using a dark theme such as NASA Night Launch. I was actually considering changing my sites favicon to not use a transparent background because of this issue.

By: Aleksej

Aleksej — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 10:29:54 +0000