How to animate Favicon

Question

Just wondering if people can let me know how to animate favicon like done in this website:

geoplugin

Only seems to work in Firefox though and not IE6.

Answer 1

While it's currently only supported by FireFox other browsers will hopefully support it in the future. To achieve the effect, you need to upload the gif to your server and then add the line below to head section of your page:

<link rel="icon" href="animated_favicon.gif" type="image/gif" >

Take a look at AnimatedFavIcon.com for additional help and resources.

Answer 2

Almost certainly not what you're looking for, but some people have gone so far as to programatically write to the favicon in client side JavaScript. The following url shows the old videogame 'Defender' playing in the favicon:

http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER%5Fof%5Fthe%5Ffavicon/

This works in Firefox, Opera and Safari, but not in at least older versions of IE. I'm not sure what the latest IE might be capable of.

Doing a 'view source' on this page makes for quite an interesting read.

Answer 3

Rename your animated gif to favicon.gif and put it where you have your index.html (or index.php... or similar) (public_html or its subdirectory if you have more sites) on your server, it will automatically work.