Animated favicons
If you visit the GIF Construction Set Professional web page at with Firefox, you might notice that the favicon is an animation, rather than a static Windows icon.
A little-known feature of Firefox will allow your pages to display 16 by 16 pixel animations as icons. You can still have your pages display traditional still icons if they’re viewed by other browsers, such as Windows Explorer.
An animated favicon must by a GIF file having screen dimensions of 16 by 16 pixels. We created the one used at the GIF Construction Set Professional page using GIF Construction Set itself, and the 3D Effects #1 plugin.
Make sure you have Patch 14 of the 3D Effects #1 plugin set or better – this update allows for animations having minimum dimension settings of sixteen pixels.
Once you’ve created a suitable animation, upload it to your web server as you would a favicon.ico file. You can name it anything you like.
You’ll need to add the following to the <head> section of each web page that is to display an animated icon:
<link rel=”icon” href=”favicon.gif” type=”image/gif”>
This assumes that your animated icons file is named favicon.gif.
Dave C:
This really great. I bookmarked GIF Construction in Firefox and the animation also appeared on the bookmark bar. Makes it easy to spot.
September 17, 2008, 5:18 pmAlex Petrov:
WOW! This is really cool. It is a pity that it only works in Firefox. Donkey (IE) as always lags behind. Thanks for post.
October 5, 2009, 1:14 amarchitectural renderings:
Thats why I keep IE and FF installed. Its best to just have both.
October 26, 2009, 2:28 pmDennis North:
That’s why I don’t.
October 31, 2009, 9:54 am