Sunday, July 12, 2009

WTF? Apple favicon on the Windows update site?

I just noticed the weirdest thing while visiting the windows update site:

windows-apple

As you can see, the shortcut icon is actually an Apple icon...WTF?!! I looked in the code, and this is the code that sets the favicon:
<link rel='shortcut icon' href='shared/images/banners/favicon.ico' type='image/x-icon'/>
When I navigate directly to http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/v6/shared/images/banners/favicon.ico I get the normal icon, that is to say, this: .When I look with IE6, I actually see that icon as favicon...so the question is, what's up with the Apple icon in IE8?! Do I have some virus or malware that has modified IE8? I googled for the problem, but can't find any references...am I the only one? Anybody else experiencing this?

6 comments:

Cd-MaN said...

My best guess is that it is some kind of cache issue (either locally or somewhere upstream)...

I couldn't reproduce it :-( (I'm sad because this is soooo funny :-)).

Anonymous said...

The same on google in IE8. In Firefox, it's the normal favicon...

rpbouman said...

Hi!

just to let you know - I don't see it anymore after running updates, and google just gives me the "g" icon. But I am still completely baffled as to why this occurred.

Unknown said...

I'm on IE 7 and I have an apple icon on google pages

Chelle said...

Ummm, I have the apple now... my computer got shut down when the power went out for a few seconds... and when my computer restarted... Google has the apple favicon in the address bar... Other websites have different favicons too. Odd!

rpbouman said...

Ok - it seems IE8 has a history of buggy favicon behaviour. I can't say I noticed myself before, but if you google for "ie8 favicon" (no quotes) you get a few forum posts about this issue.

The Advice as to fix it: "clean the browser cache" and "set IE to clear the cache after each visit"....yeah, right...I guess actually fixing the behaviour would be too much trouble.

Anyway, I'm satisfied being convinced that this is not some virus. Otherwise, I couldn't care less.

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