Favicon Fundamentals
Start here if you want the ground truth rather than a copy-pasted snippet.
A favicon stopped being one file a long time ago. Today it's a small family of assets — a multi-resolution .ico for legacy fallback, PNGs at 16, 32 and 180 pixels, manifest icons at 192 and 512, and increasingly an SVG that scales to all of them. Each one is read by a different consumer: browser tabs, iOS home screens, Android launchers, search results, RSS readers. These guides cover what each file is for, which sizes genuinely still matter in 2026, and the precedence rules browsers use when a page declares several icons at once.
Maskable Icons Explained: Why Your PWA Icon Gets Cropped on Android
What the maskable purpose in a web app manifest actually does, how big the safe zone is, and how to ship maskable and standard icons without one ruining the other.
6 min read
ReadFundamentalsThe Legacy Favicon Tags You Can Finally Delete (And the Four You Can't)
Most favicon snippets on the web still carry a decade of dead tags: mask-icon, browserconfig.xml, msapplication-*, precomposed icons. Here's what each one did and which are still doing work.
6 min read
ReadFundamentalsHow Browsers Actually Decide Which Favicon to Show
Declare five icons and the browser displays one. The selection rules aren't the order you wrote them in — here's what governs the choice, and why two sites with identical markup can show different icons.
7 min read
ReadFundamentalsThe Web App Manifest, Explained: Icons, Theme Color and PWA Installs
What site.webmanifest actually does, which fields matter for icons, and how to get it right.
5 min read
ReadFundamentalsThe History of the Favicon: From Internet Explorer 5 to PWAs
How a 16-pixel Microsoft afterthought in 1999 became one of the most-requested files on the web.
5 min read
ReadFundamentalsFavicon vs Apple Touch Icon vs App Icon: What's the Difference?
Three names, three jobs — how favicons, Apple touch icons and app icons differ, and why a site needs all three.
5 min read
ReadFundamentalsThe Complete Favicon Size Guide for 2026 (16px to 512px)
Every favicon size a modern site actually needs, what each one is for, and which file to export it as.
4 min read
ReadFundamentalsDo You Still Need a favicon.ico File in 2026?
PNG and SVG favicons are everywhere now — here's why the humble .ico file still refuses to die.
4 min read
ReadFundamentalsPNG vs SVG vs ICO: Which Favicon Format Should You Use?
A practical, no-nonsense comparison of the three favicon formats and when to reach for each one.
4 min read
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