[BoulderDash]

Hey there,
I created a favicon.ico and sampled it down to 8 colors (16 was safe, so I thought this for sure would be). Why is it that Safari, et al. is using the 4-bit version to display it - and that version looks terrible.

I'm using IconBuilderPro, and am creating a .ico file - and the 4-bit versions look terrbile. No matter which Palette I select, IconBuilderPro makes the 4-bit version look bad.

I thought 4-bit meant "16 colors or less" which is what I have. Or does 4-bit use a certain Palette whose colors I can't change? And if so, how can I get a copy of this 4-bot palette so that I can make my images look good on a Mac?

And why is Safari using 4-bit anyway and not 8-bit?

Sorry for all of the questions... I'm just frustrated that it seems everyone's favicon's look cool and I can't create mine!

Thanks,
BD

[philzilla]

i make mine as a normal gif, save, ship over to my pc, then use an app called IrfanView to save as an .ico

it's a free app, so, if you have access to a pc (or, VPC), i suggest trying that method

[-Q-]

Check out this tutorial.

[BoulderDash]

Hi there phil and -Q-,
Yeah, that's the tutorial I used... but it doesn't work as smoothly as advertised. For one, his favicon looks great because it's greyscale. What I think he doesn't mention is that any color images will look like garbage in the 4-bit previews because they rely on a color Palette whcih cannot be changed.

So, the best method I've found is to create a 16x16 image and reduce it down to 256 or 16 colors - I have not found any clear, definitive documentation as to which is correct by either browsr or platform. Then, save it as BMP. Then open it with GraphicConverter. Then add a mask (though I think masks only work with 16 color images on PC's for favicon as I'm slowly learning). Than save as a .ico file from GraphicConverter.

With this method, it looks great on PC and Mac, unlike when using the above tutorial whcih made the 4-bit images be the ones displayed (while being stuck on the Palette which couldn't be changed).

Thanks though!
BD

[Arkham_c]

There is a bug in safari. It uses the first icon, not the best one, in the favicon.ico. See Dave Hyatt's weblog for details.

http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/

[nica]

Try this Tutorial

http://www.golivein24.com/tips/favicon/index.html

[arcticmac]

my favorite way to boost quality of favicons is to screw users of older browsers and ie and just be different...

who here knew that you can use a png as a favicon???? I did!!

that way you get full colors and a full 8bit mask, meaning good transparency!! yay...

[redJag]

Originally posted by arcticmac:
that way you get full colors and a full 8bit mask, meaning good transparency!! yay...

and alpha opacity!! (probably what you meant by transparency?)

[Sage]

Can you link to both an .ico and .png favicon? (Have two links in the head)

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Sage:
Can you link to both an .ico and .png favicon? (Have two links in the head)

You probably can, but I'm not sure which one would be used.

I would guess that as long as you specified the MIME types correctly (image/x-icon and image/png, respectively) the browser would use the PNG icon if it could and the ICO icon if that wasn't an option. That's how it should work, anyway. More likely, you'll have to put them in a certain order, but I don't know which one you would need to put first.

In any case, though, this shouldn't be harmful to any browsers out there, so feel free to experiment with it. This could be a useful technique.

[Twister]

I use a photoshop plugin if you are still looking for something it works great.

http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/info/icoformat.html