Saving Favicons

When Favorites are save in Internet Explorer, if the Webmaster has coded it, the Favorite will have a customized icon displayed alongside it, rather than the default IE icon.  Favorites with such icons look like this:

while Favorites without favicons would appear with the default icon, shown here:

When a new Favorites is added to the listing, the favicon is stored in the Temporary Internet Files folder.  After a few days, when the older entries in that folder are purged, the favicon file is lost and the listing in Favorites will then display the default icon.

To make the favicon permanent, the user must first copy it to a permanent folder.  To do this, open the Temporary Internet Files folder in Windows Explorer.  Sort the entries by type (click on Type at the top of the column) which will organize the entries alphabetically by type name.  Scroll down to the "I" entries and the favicons will be displayed beside their filenames.  Many Webmasters call them "favicons" but they may be called by any name.  They will all, however, be of type Icon and have the extension .ico.

Right-click the file to be save and choose Copy from the context menu.  Then navigate to the folder where the file is to be saved, click the folder's name to select it, then go to Edit|Paste.  The file will be added to the contents of the folder.  To prevent duplicate names (many icons copied in this fashion will have the name favicon[1].ico) right-click the filename, select Rename, and type in the new filename

To associate the new favicon with the Favorite, open the Favorites listing in Internet Explorer.  Locate the Favorite and right-click it.  Select Properties from the context menu.  (Note that even if the favicon is displayed at this time, it is being associated to the file in Temporary Internet Files, so associating it with the new file is required.)

On the Properties page, click "Change icon" then click "Browse."  Navigate to the folder where the favicons are stored permanently.  Click to select the appropriate icon and click "Open."  The icon will now be displayed on the Properties page.  OK out.

For users with many Favorites which have favicons, one utility program which can automatically retrieve them and store them permanently is FavOrg, which can be downloaded from here (note that as of 2003 there is a fee for accessing the ZiffDavis utility library).  A pirated copy on a Web site whose owner is apparently not concerned with copyright infringement can be downloaded from here.