0 Favicon Cross Browser compatibility

In the original Microsoft standard, a .ico image was used as the Favicon. And even with IE8, still Internet explorer has support only for .ico Favicons. However, now a days leading browsers like Firefox, chrome, opera are supporting a number of image formats as Favicon. Let’s analyze the cross browser compatibility of different image formats like gif, png, jpg etc as a Favicon.

Favicon Browser Compatibility

Browser	ICO	PNG	GIF	animated GIFs	JPEG
Mozilla Firefox	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Opera	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Google Chrome	Yes	4.0	4.0	NO	4.0
Internet Explorer	Yes	NO	NO	NO	NO
Safari	Yes	4.0	4.0	4.0	4.0

• Animated Favicons- Only Firefox and opera will support animated Favicon. Chrome will be rendering only first frame of the animated gif Favicon and will display it. IE will not support the animated favicons at all.
  
• IE, who introduced the concept of Favicons still having support only for .ico format even with its recent version IE8
  
• .ico format is cross-browser compatible and is supported by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.
  
• .gif, .png and .jpg Favicons have support in all leading browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera) except Internet Explorer.