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When putting a favicon on your site, you can apparently use an animated gif, just by changing the gif file’s extension to .ico.

Have you encountered any problems doing this? (Aside from users being driven mad by some stupid little blinking favicon.)

Have you seen a browser get confused by a gif file with a .ico extension?

Paul D. Waite
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  • On the other hand, have you ever seen this actually *work*? Browsers are not obligated to support such things. – Greg Hewgill Mar 15 '10 at 15:32
  • I’ve not personally, and you’re quite right, there’s no obligation to support such madness. Just wondering if anyone had seen a browser crap out with a mis-named gif file favicon, e.g. render no favicon at all. – Paul D. Waite Mar 15 '10 at 17:21
  • The icon for http://www.nerdist.com is an animated gif, which works in Firefox, but not in IE. I don't understand why you should bother trying to trick the browser with a different file extension when you can always set the mime type in the link tag. – JustinStolle Jun 04 '10 at 08:06
  • “ I don't understand why you should bother trying to trick the browser with a different file extension when you can always set the mime type in the link tag.” — I guess it’s because lots of browsers just do a dumb request for /favicon.ico, so developers use that file name to avoid 404s. Of course, you could do a redirect instead, and if the `` tag prevents this behaviour in most browsers, they might as well go with that. – Paul D. Waite Jun 04 '10 at 09:49
  • Possible duplicate of [How to animate a favicon?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1837261/how-to-animate-a-favicon) – Michał Perłakowski Apr 08 '16 at 01:24

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Older browser probably will have an issue with it. And as always remember that animations tend to annoy some people. Yes, favicons are small and in the address bar but some people used to turn off JavaScript just because of scrolling status bar messages. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

John Conde
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    Totally with you on the annoyance, personally I’d never do this. Just asking because a designer enquired as to whether it worked. – Paul D. Waite Mar 15 '10 at 17:20
  • “Older browser probably will have an issue with it.” — Have you actually seen any that do? – Paul D. Waite Mar 17 '10 at 17:32
  • @Paul From that article you linked to, "So far, only Mozilla Firefox and Opera can display animated icon, and Internet Explorer didn’t support it." The article was written 3 years ago. Sadly, some people do have browsers that old. – Ponkadoodle May 02 '10 at 18:13
  • @wallacoloo Right, it’s just that was a bit of a vague description. Do they show no image at all? Or the first frame of the GIF? Or the last? Or the *fourth*? – Paul D. Waite May 03 '10 at 12:53