Serving favicon.ico in ASP.NET MVC

Question

What is the final/best recommendation for how to serve favicon.ico in ASP.NET MVC?

I am currently doing the following:

• Adding an entry to the very beginning of my RegisterRoutes method:

  routes.IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico");
  

• Placing favicon.ico in the root of my application (which is also going to be the root of my domain).

I have two questions:

• Is there no way to put the favicon.ico somewhere other than the root of my application. It's pretty icky being right there at the same level as Content and Controllers.

• Is this IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico") statement sufficient - or should I also do the following as discussed in a blog post from Phil Haack. I'm not aware of ever having seen a request to favicon.ico in any directory other than the root - which would make this unnecessary (but it's good to know how to do it).

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

Answer 1

1) You can put your favicon where you want and add this tag to your page head

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

although some browsers will try to get the favicon from /favicon.ico by default, so you should use the IgnoreRoute.

2) If a browser makes a request for the favicon in another directory it will get a 404 error wich is fine and if you have the link tag in answer 1 in your master page the browser will get the favicon you want.

Answer 2

Placing favicon.ico in the root of your domain only really affects IE5, IIRC. For more modern browsers you should be able to include a link tag to point to another directory:

<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.mydomain.com/content/favicon.ico"/>

You can also use non-ico files for browsers other than IE, for which I'd maybe use the following conditional statement to serve a PNG to FF,etc, and an ICO to IE:

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="http://www.mydomain.com/content/favicon.png" />
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.mydomain.com/content/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />
<![endif]-->