How can I get a web site's favicon?

Question

Simple enough question: I\'ve created a small app that is basically just a favourites that sits in my system tray so that I can open often-used sites/folders/files from the

Answer 1

You'll want to tackle this a few ways:

1. Look for the favicon.ico at the root of the domain

   www.domain.com/favicon.ico

2. Look for a tag with the rel="shortcut icon" attribute

3. Look for a tag with the rel="icon" attribute

The latter two will usually yield a higher quality image.

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Just to cover all of the bases, there are device specific icon files that might yield higher quality images since these devices usually have larger icons on the device than a browser would need:

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And to download the icon without caring what the icon is you can use a utility like http://www.google.com/s2/favicons which will do all of the heavy lifting:

var client = new System.Net.WebClient();

client.DownloadFile(
    @"http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=stackoverflow.com",
    "stackoverflow.com.ico");