Yahoo! showing Google favourite Icon in IE

Recently I came across a problem from one of my friends. Whenever he browses to Yahoo! in Internet Explorer it was showing Google’s favourite icon (Favicon) in browser address bar. He was confused. I then found the answer to the problem, which I am giving below.

When you navigate to a site, IE downloads the favicon and caches it in the temporary internet files folder, where the this favicon will be assigned a unique name and mapped to its URL. So for example, if you navigate to www.bing.com, IE will download the favicon from http://www.bing.com/favicon.ico and cache it as favicon[1].ico somewhere in the temporary internet files folder, and map it to http://www.bing.com/favicon.ico.

Now if you somehow remove this favicon file from the temporary internet files folder, without removing the mapping to its URL, then the cache entry http://www.bing.com/favicon.ico will point to a non-existent file. Now say you navigate to http://my.yahoo.com, and IE downloads the favicon from http://my.yahoo.com/favicon.ico to the SAME favicon[1].ico file in the temporary internet file folder, then the cache entry http://www.bing.com/favicon.ico will be mapping to the yahoo favicon.So the next time you go on http://www.bing.com, IE will query the cache and incorrectly think that the favicon for this site has already been downloaded and is avail

able on file. It will load the favicon[1].ico for http://my.yahoo.com, and hence the wrong favicon will be displayed.

Ordinarily you cannot remove a file from the Temporary internet files folder without also removing the file’s mapping. But you can do this by running the del /s command in  command line or possibly by using 3^rd party cache cleaning tools. Note that cleaning your temporary internet files folder through IE or the Internet Options Dialog will restore everything back to normal.