Oct 23, 2021 15:00:00

What is the 'unknown favicon fact' found by analyzing 425,909 favicon?

The 'Favicon ' that appears in the search results of Google for mobile and the edge of the tab of the browser is an important element to impress the website. There is no industry standard for how to implement this favicon, and the file size and file format differ for each site. Meanwhile, a report summarizing the characteristics of 425,909 favicon collections from 100,000 websites has been released.

We Analyzed 425,909 Favicons • iconmap.io
https://icGaAs.io/blog

◆ Collection results
The author of the report publishes the 425,909 favicon collections on the following page.

We Analyzed 425,909 Favicons
https://ic0032.io/

A search window is provided at the top left of the favicon list page. To find out if the GIGAZINE favicon is registered, enter 'gigazine.net' in the search window and press the Enter key ...

The favicon and overview of GIGAZINE are displayed. On the favicon list page, you can search for the favicon of the website you are interested in or check the website information from the favicon like this.

◆ Favicon file size
The median file size of the 425,909 favicon collected was 1.9KB. However, there are some favicon with large file size. For example, the favicon located on the website of the communication app 'Discord' was 280KB.

The favicon with the largest file size was placed on the project pageof the black hole visualization project 'Event Horizon Telescope ', and the file size was said to have reached 7MB.

On the other hand, there are favicon with a small file size of several hundred bytes. The smallest file size was the favicon used on Microsoft's website, which had a file size of only 112B.

◆ Favicon file format
The favicon uses the ICO format, which can store image files of multiple resolutions. When I checked the resolution of the images stored in this ICO file, 99.7% of the websites contained images of 16 x 16 pixels. In addition, the combinations of stored images are '16 x 16 pixels only', '16 x 16 pixels and 32 x 32 pixels and 48 x 48 pixels', '16 x 16 pixels and 32 x 32 pixels', and '32 x 32' in descending order. 'Pixels only', and these four combinations alone accounted for 79% of the total.

As mentioned above, ICO files generally store images with 1 to 3 different resolutions, but some websites have a large number of resolutions available. For example, the ICO file on the website of the VPN service 'hola' contains a total of 20 images that differ by 1 pixel in height and width, such as '16 x 16 pixels, 17 x 17 pixels, 18 x 18 pixels ...'. It is said that.

In addition, the most common image file format stored in ICO files was PNG format, which accounted for 71.6% of the total. In addition, the SVG format, which has begun to be increasingly adopted as a favicon file format in recent years, was used by 1.1% of websites.