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 same place. Getting the default icons from my system for known file types isn't terribly complicated, but I don't know how to get the favicon from a website. (SO has the grey->orange stack icon in the address bar for instance)

Does anyone know how I might go about that?

Answer 1

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.

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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" />

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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");