Favicons in actual use

[dthomsen8]

I thought I understood how favicons work, but now I am not so sure.

If I go to a web site in MSIE 7 that has a favicon defined in the (X)HTML, and drag the graphic from the address window onto the desktop, the favicon comes along just fine. The name seems to be the name in the <title>, or if there is a null or no title, the name seems to be the URL.

Since I have Firefox 2 as my default browser, the favicon (or now, desktop icon) works just fine to go to that site using Firefox as the browser.

Although some of the online articles indicate that Firefox uses favicons just like MSIE 5 and up, that doesn't seem to be the case for me in Windows XP Pro, Version 5.1, Service Pack 2.

If a specific URL is important to how favicons work, I will post the specific URL here, but I have tried it with a variety of sites. There seems to be something that I don't know, so here is a request for more information.