Inventing favicon.ico
I offer readers of Geektimes an article by Ray Sun "Inventing Favicon.ico" .
In 1998, I worked as a novice program manager in the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. My first project was the release of Internet Explorer 4 Plus , a CD with IE4 and a bunch of other trial junk, which we sold for $ 49 per box. Yes, get together around the guys, now I’ll tell you about the times when browsers were sold in physical boxes on CompUSA, a pack of chewing gum cost half a cent, and the cola still contained cocaine.
Well, I'm distracted.
We released Internet Explorer 4 and actively worked on Internet Explorer 5, which was full of cool features such as offline mode using CDF, the all-new Trident engine, as well as Weblications, is an outstripping attempt to give developers the ability to create rich applications in the browser (although, I think, this ultimately led to the invention of AJAX ).
At that time, I always stayed at work until 10 pm, mainly because of the free dinner, and of the lack of privacy.
And so, one of these evenings, one of our senior developers Bharat Shiyam asked me to look into his office to show something. I think he was writing at that moment some amazing but completely useless specification or patent. So I went to his office, where I found Bhara bent over his computer - it was a 133 MHz pentium - in one window of which Win32 C + + COM was ridiculous, and in the other there was his local build IE5.
“Check it out,” he said, and added a bookmark to his favorites. It was amazing that a cute icon was on the left of his bookmark! Until then, no one had yet invented technology to do this. However, Marc Andressen did not think about it, and this guy is rich , is not it?
Bharat said: “Not bad, is it? Well, turn on this feature? ". I replied: “Yes, of course, but how does it work?” He further told me that all he had to do was just add the favicon.icon file to the root of his IIS server! So I said, “of course that sounds great,” and went back to my office.
The next day, my boss called me to his place. "Have you agreed on this feature?" I replied: "Yes, of course." Then he shouted at me, saying that Bharat used me - he specifically looked for a young PM to include this feature, and I had to refuse. I promised that I would not do so in the future.
But now, when I look back, I understand that we did everything right. Seriously, how dangerous could this feature be?
I still remember telling my friendYahoo Michael Redwin on favicon.ico. He scanned the Yapache logs for fun, as he usually did, and noticed an unusual pop-up of HTTP requests at www.yahoo.com/favicon.ico . He asked what kind of thing is favicon.ico? I explained to him. He was so excited that he immediately threw the favicon onto the server, which seemed to be the first official favicon in history.
Here is the story of favicon.ico's invention. For you guys.
Ray
In 1998, I worked as a novice program manager in the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. My first project was the release of Internet Explorer 4 Plus , a CD with IE4 and a bunch of other trial junk, which we sold for $ 49 per box. Yes, get together around the guys, now I’ll tell you about the times when browsers were sold in physical boxes on CompUSA, a pack of chewing gum cost half a cent, and the cola still contained cocaine.
Well, I'm distracted.
We released Internet Explorer 4 and actively worked on Internet Explorer 5, which was full of cool features such as offline mode using CDF, the all-new Trident engine, as well as Weblications, is an outstripping attempt to give developers the ability to create rich applications in the browser (although, I think, this ultimately led to the invention of AJAX ).
At that time, I always stayed at work until 10 pm, mainly because of the free dinner, and of the lack of privacy.
And so, one of these evenings, one of our senior developers Bharat Shiyam asked me to look into his office to show something. I think he was writing at that moment some amazing but completely useless specification or patent. So I went to his office, where I found Bhara bent over his computer - it was a 133 MHz pentium - in one window of which Win32 C + + COM was ridiculous, and in the other there was his local build IE5.
“Check it out,” he said, and added a bookmark to his favorites. It was amazing that a cute icon was on the left of his bookmark! Until then, no one had yet invented technology to do this. However, Marc Andressen did not think about it, and this guy is rich , is not it?
Bharat said: “Not bad, is it? Well, turn on this feature? ". I replied: “Yes, of course, but how does it work?” He further told me that all he had to do was just add the favicon.icon file to the root of his IIS server! So I said, “of course that sounds great,” and went back to my office.
The next day, my boss called me to his place. "Have you agreed on this feature?" I replied: "Yes, of course." Then he shouted at me, saying that Bharat used me - he specifically looked for a young PM to include this feature, and I had to refuse. I promised that I would not do so in the future.
But now, when I look back, I understand that we did everything right. Seriously, how dangerous could this feature be?
I still remember telling my friendYahoo Michael Redwin on favicon.ico. He scanned the Yapache logs for fun, as he usually did, and noticed an unusual pop-up of HTTP requests at www.yahoo.com/favicon.ico . He asked what kind of thing is favicon.ico? I explained to him. He was so excited that he immediately threw the favicon onto the server, which seemed to be the first official favicon in history.
Here is the story of favicon.ico's invention. For you guys.
Ray