HTML favicon won't show on google chrome

html google-chrome hyperlink favicon
Nick picture Nick · Dec 8, 2012 · Viewed 100.4k times · Source

I am making a HTML page that is unpublished . One of the things I wanted to do was add a favicon to appear next to the title. I'm using google chrome and I noticed that other websites have favicons that appear next to the tile in the browser, but the one I'm trying to display won't show up. The site in in a folder on my desktop named site. This is the code: 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html> 
    <head>
        <title></title>
        <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
    </head>
    <body>
    </body>
</html>

Answer

Christofer Eliasson picture Christofer Eliasson · Dec 8, 2012

Since you have a leading / in your href, you are referencing a file that will be in the root-folder. In case you have your page in a folder on your computer, not serving it from a local webserver, the leading / will tell the browser to look in the root folder of your filesystem. So the browser expect the file to be at C:/favicon.ico or similar, which is probably not what you've expected.

If you have the favicon.ico in the same folder as the web page, you could just remove the leading slash, and the icon should be visible.

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

Update:

As a debug option, your could try to add a tag that you know works. I borrowed this snippet from the StackOverflow source. Try replacing your link tag with this and see if you get the SO logo as your favicon.

<link rel="shortcut icon" 
      href="http://cdn.sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/favicon.ico">

Update 2:

It appears that there is a bug reported on Chromium where the favicon isn't displayed if the file is loaded locally, without being served through a webserver.

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