So basically stick with .png's if you aren't totally fussed about browser compatibility. However, as a reasonable percentage of people still use IE in one form or another it seems if you want the icon fille to display with cross-browser compatibility sticking to the .ico filetype is the best idea.

alpha transparency requires a 32-bit image (the 3 colour channels: RGB, and 1alpha transparency channel; 8-bits per channel = 32 bits)

Ok, yeah sorry. I had it at 32 bits in Fireworks when exporting.

Opera/FF/Safari DO support 32 bit PNG favicons.

Interesting adition to the coversation here. I originally had
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
and it did not work but when I copied Moofasa and changed type to
type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" it worked in IE. and it still works in FF too.


Question tho, do i still need the other line
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
What does that line do that rel="shortcut icon" doesnt do?

Edit: actually now IE is using the favicon for all pages on my domain, even ones where there is no code telling it to. I guess once it sees the code it just associated the whole site with that image (not that theres anything wrong with that)