Favicon Downloader

What a favicon downloader does

A favicon downloader takes a web address, reads the page behind it, and reports the icons that site declares for itself. Browsers do the same thing quietly every time you open a tab: they look for link elements in the page head, fall back to /favicon.ico if none are declared, and pick whichever size fits the place the icon will be shown. This tool makes that process visible and lets you save the files it finds.

How to download a favicon

1. Paste the address of the site you are interested in. Either example.com or the full https://example.com works.
2. Press Download favicon. The page is fetched on the server and its icon declarations are read.
3. Look through the results. Each entry shows a preview, the icon's dimensions where they could be determined, its format, and the URL it came from.
4. Download a single icon, or take the whole set as a ZIP archive.

How the tool detects website icons

Several standard declarations are checked, in the order browsers themselves consider them:

• <link rel="icon"> and the older rel="shortcut icon" — the ordinary tab icon, often declared several times at different sizes.
• <link rel="apple-touch-icon"> — the larger icon iOS uses when a site is added to the home screen.
• <link rel="mask-icon"> — a monochrome SVG used by Safari for pinned tabs.
• <meta name="msapplication-TileImage"> — the tile image for Windows.
• The web app manifest, which lists icons for Android home screens and installable web apps.
• /favicon.ico and /apple-touch-icon.png at the site root, which many sites still serve without declaring them anywhere.

Duplicates are removed, each file is checked to confirm it really is an image, and the results are ordered from largest to smallest so the most useful version is at the top.

Common favicon formats

ICO is a container format that can hold several sizes inside one file. It exists for historical reasons: early browsers looked for /favicon.ico without any declaration in the page, and that convention has never fully gone away.

PNG is the most common modern choice. It is a plain image with lossless compression and full transparency support, declared explicitly with a link element and a sizes attribute so the browser can pick the right file.

SVG icons are vector drawings that stay sharp at any size, and can adapt to dark mode using a media query inside the file. Support is now broad enough that many sites ship an SVG icon with a PNG fallback.

JPG and WebP appear occasionally. Nothing prevents them, though JPG is a poor fit because it cannot store transparency.

Difference between favicon.ico and other icon formats

The practical difference is declaration and packaging. favicon.ico is found by convention at a fixed path and can bundle 16, 32 and 48 pixel versions in one file. Every other format has to be pointed at explicitly from the page head, but in exchange each file is a single clean image that is easy to inspect, edit and cache. A site that ships both covers old and new browsers at once, which is why this tool often returns several icons for one address.

Common favicon sizes

• 16 × 16 — the original tab icon size, still used in some bookmark lists.
• 32 × 32 — the size most desktop browsers actually display in the tab.
• 48 × 48 — desktop shortcuts and some Windows contexts.
• 180 × 180 — the Apple touch icon for iOS home screens.
• 192 × 192 and 512 × 512 — Android home screens and web app manifest icons.

Why a website may have several icons

One image cannot serve every context well. A tab icon is displayed at 16 or 32 pixels and needs a bold, simplified shape; a home screen icon is ten times larger and shows detail; a pinned-tab mask icon has to work as a single-colour silhouette. Sites therefore publish a small family of icons and let each platform choose. That is also why the results here are frequently variations of the same mark rather than different designs.

Where favicon files are normally used

Browser tabs and bookmark lists are the obvious places, but the same files also appear in browsing history, in the address bar suggestions, on mobile home screens when a site is installed as a web app, in RSS readers and link-preview cards, and in the site lists shown by search and analytics dashboards. A missing or blurry icon quietly affects all of them.

How to use a favicon on a website

Put the icon files somewhere public — the site root is the simplest — and declare them in the page head. A typical modern set declares a 32 pixel PNG as rel="icon", a 180 pixel PNG as rel="apple-touch-icon", and an SVG as an additional rel="icon" with type="image/svg+xml". Keeping a favicon.ico at the root costs nothing and catches anything that still looks for it. Browsers cache icons aggressively, so after changing one it is normal to need a hard refresh before the new version appears.

Why some websites do not expose a downloadable favicon

A few situations genuinely prevent detection: the site declares no icon and serves nothing at /favicon.ico; the server rejects requests that do not come from a normal browser session; the page is behind a login or a bot-protection challenge; the icon is injected later by JavaScript rather than declared in the HTML; or the address simply does not resolve. In each case the tool reports the problem it ran into instead of returning an invented result.

A note on using icons you download

Icons are usually logos, and logos are usually protected by copyright and trademark law. Downloading one to inspect it, test a layout, document an integration or build a directory of links is ordinary practice. Adopting another organisation's mark as the icon of your own site is not, regardless of how easy the file is to obtain.