Why is Chrome searching for my favicon.ico when I serve up a file from ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I have a controller in MVC serving up images from a database.

EDIT: This still happens if I serve up a file over completely standard means in MVC.

Eve

Answer 1

The actual answer: It's a known, verified bug. *(recently fixed!... maybe?)

Looks like a known, longstanding issue with Chrome: http://crbug.com/39402

If you want it fixed sooner, star the issue. More people starring the issue will likely increase its priority and possibly get it fixed faster.

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****UPDATE 1***: As of May 15 of this year (2013)--four years after this question was asked--it looks like the issue has been fixed in version 29: http://crbug.com/39402#c47

Feel free to undo all your hacks and workarounds. :]

****UPDATE 2 (2015-01)***: This is apparently still an issue for some users, according to the same issue link. :/

Answer 2

I ran into this problem a while back and got around it by ignoring the specific route by adding

routes.IgnoreRoute("{*favicon}", new { favicon = ".*/favicon\\.ico" });

into the RegisterRoutes method in Global.asax.

Answer 3

You can add something like this within your web.config file to make sure that the favicon.ico is cached on the client and is not being requested every time.

<location path="favicon.ico">
    <system.webServer>
        <httpProtocol>
            <customHeaders>
                <add name="Cache-Control" value="public, max-age=31536000" />
             </customHeaders>
        </httpProtocol>
    </system.webServer>
</location>

You can/should do the same for any images / .js and css files

Answer 4

If you check your project setting it says default icon somewhere. Remove that?

Answer 5

Its important to put in an ICON link into your masterpage or some browsers will try to find favicon.ico for all directories and not just globally once per done.

 <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="<%= Url.Content("~/content/images/rr-favicon.ico") %>"/>

It seems google toolbar is the guilty party judging by my logs (and IE6 of course). They both will make requests for directories other than the root

 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GoogleToolbar 6.2.1910.1554; Windows 6.0; MSIE 8.0.6001.18828)

Answer 6

Do you have a favicon? If not, perhaps that's why Chrome is attempting to find it every time for your website. For google it already has the favicon cached.