jadrian wrote:

As it is currently implemented, using rel="shortcut icon", Firefox 3 does not recognize favicons set with $wgFavicon. A quick-and-dirty fix is the following:

• Add a new line in includes/DefaultSettings.php: $wgFaviconType = 'image/vnd.microsoft.icon';
• Modify the line in includes/Skin.php that reads: $out->addLink( array( 'rel' => 'shortcut icon', 'href' => $wgFavicon ) ); to instead be $out->addLink( array( 'rel' => 'icon', 'type' => $wgFaviconType, 'href' => $wgFavicon ) );

In this case the user must specify $wgFaviconType as well as $wgFavicon in LocalSettings.php, e.g.:

$wgFavicon = '/images/myIcon.gif'
$wgFaviconType = 'image/gif';

Theoretically the type could be derived from the extension on the icon file itself, but that involves more code and also would break under the common case of the web designer renaming a non-ICO image (an animated GIF, for example) to have a .ico extension (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon#Legacy).

Is what was true in 2009 still true in 2020?

According to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types "The shortcut link type is often seen before icon, but this link type is non-conforming, ignored and web authors must not use it anymore. "

So sounds like we should do this.

Change 824720 had a related patch set uploaded (by R4356thwiki; author: R4356thwiki):

[mediawiki/core@master] OutputPage: replace legacy link type "shortcut icon" with standard

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/824720

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon#How_to_use
This does break link based ico's on IE 9 and 10 (though still falling back to favicon.ico on root path of course), because in 9 and 10 you have to specify the type attribute for this to work apparently ?

I don't think this is a problem as IE11 is our current browser support cutoff, but just wanted to document it.

It's probably not worth it for a secondary feature, especially when it adds bytes to every page. IE 9 and 10 are roughly 0.07% of browser usage; on one of my own sites I see just 20 visits out of 986,000 using IE 9, while IE 10 does not show up (IE 11 was 1,182 - still just 0.1%).

I actually have IE 9 on Vista and I tried visiting Wikipedia and it just refused to connect at all, because it does not support TLS 1.2, which is the default now for most new OS versions. There is a way to enable this by installing updates for Server 2008 but this is unlikely to be done by most end-users. Of course, it is also a more regular update for Windows 7, but IE 11 was also offered there.

Change 824720 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@master] OutputPage: replace legacy link type "shortcut icon" with standard

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/824720