Favicons, are crucial for branding and user experience. Traditionally, favicons were .ico files, but the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format has emerged as a modern alternative. The question is should developers and website owners only use an SVG favicon or should you use a multiple format approach?

The Upsides: Why Choose SVG Favicons?

SVG favicons offer several compelling advantages for contemporary web design:

• Perfect Scalability: As a vector format, SVG favicons scale perfectly to any display resolution without pixelation, looking crisp on high-DPI and Retina screens. This “future-proofs” your favicon, ensuring it remains sharp regardless of device advancements. For example take a look at our simple SVG favicon. 32x32

152x152 512x512

Notice how the SVG is clear no matter what size it is rendered at? That is the beauty of SVG.

• Dynamic Customization & Dark Mode Support: SVG files can embed CSS, allowing for dynamic styling and real-time modification. A significant benefit is the ability to automatically adapt colors based on a user’s light/dark mode preference through prefers-color-scheme media queries embedded directly within the SVG. This ensures your favicon maintains optimal contrast and appearance in varying theme environments.

• Potentially Smaller File Sizes: Optimized SVG files can be smaller than equivalent raster images, leading to faster page loads and improved performance and with flawless resizing it is possible to reuse the same image on the website with imroved load time. For example the our SVG Favicon is 3KB. The ico file is 6KB and the PNG is actually the smallest at 2KB. The final size will depend on the complexity of your Favicon.

• Enhanced Accessibility & Rendering Quality: Compared to older formats or icon fonts, SVG icons generally provide higher accessibility standards (e.g., easier to tag with alt text) and superior rendering quality because they are vector-based.

The Downsides: Challenges with SVG Favicons

Despite their advantages, SVG favicons come with certain limitations:

• Incomplete Browser Support: While supported by most modern browsers like Chrome (v80+), Firefox (v41+), and Edge (v80+), SVG favicons are not universally supported across all browsers and platforms. Older browsers, such as Internet Explorer, do not support them at all. Notably, Firefox Android also lacks support for SVG favicons. Safari’s support has evolved, with earlier versions (prior to Safari 12) having limited or non-standard implementations, although more recent versions are capable of using standard favicons.

• Additional Steps & Fallbacks Still Needed: Even when using SVG, you still need to provide fallback formats like .ico and various PNG sizes (e.g., for Apple touch icons, Android app icons, and other platform-specific needs) to ensure broad compatibility across all devices and older browsers. Some argue this makes it an “additional step for no real benefit (not yet)”.

• Manual Editing Complexity: You might need a different editor to create and edit the SVG favicon. My favorite is Inkscape, but there are others. Just be ready to do some more learning to create the perfect favicon.

The Need for a Multi-Format Approach

At this point, like the majority of web design as new technologies become mainstream, the state of SVG favicons is still in flux. With the majority of mobile browsers still not supporting SVG favicons web designers will need a multi-format approach for comprehensive favicon support. While a SVG favicon offers significant modern advantages like perfect scalability and dark mode adaptation, relying solely on it will exclude users on older browsers or specific mobile environments.

The best practice involves progressive enhancement: serving a well-supported .ico favicon as a baseline fallback, and then offering an .svg version for modern browsers that support it. Then for optimal display on mobile devices it is crucial to include specific PNG sizes for example a 180x180 for Apple touch icons, 192x192 and 512x512 for Android. With this in mind here at FreeFavicon we will be making changes to how you download files. If at all possible we will be providing an SVG version and the existing zip file package, but we will also be expanding the sizes available to download so you can get the exact sizes you need for your project. Look for these changes coming soon as we improve the downloads on all of the favicon information pages.