Interesting service. I am building a bookmarking app that needs to load a lot of favicons.<p>There are libraries like this: <a href="https://github.com/zongyz/get-website-favicon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zongyz/get-website-favicon</a>, but I suppose your service is even easier to use.<p>The big feature I would be interested in is being able to load multiple favicons at the same time as a sprite sheet: loading favicons one-at-a-time is very slow and inefficient.<p>An example of a site that caches favicons as a sprite sheet is <a href="https://www.bkmks.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bkmks.com/</a>
Lots of use cases for this! I've used <a href="https://clearbit.com/blog/logo/" rel="nofollow">https://clearbit.com/blog/logo/</a> in the past.<p>Results are somewhat different, e.g. compare <a href="https://icon.horse/icon/wikipedia.org" rel="nofollow">https://icon.horse/icon/wikipedia.org</a> to <a href="https://logo.clearbit.com/wikipedia.org" rel="nofollow">https://logo.clearbit.com/wikipedia.org</a>
Hi HN,<p>I was working on an app, and in it, we wanted to render an icon for links from meeting invites. This turned out to be quite a pain!<p>I found other things that could return icon data, but alas they were all JSON APIs. I didn't relish the idea of fetching an endpoint for each and every website icon I needed to load (and write glue code to render the best icon out of the bunch).<p>You'd think favicons are as simple as loading "example.com/favicon.ico" but there's a lot of subtleties to it.<p>First, favicon.ico's are often really low res – there's often higher res icons available via tags in the HTML or through the manifest file.<p>Second, what if the hostname is unreachable or if there is no favicon at all?<p>And third, no one wants to parse a whole HTML page just to get one little icon!<p>So that's why I made Icon Horse – it automatically parses the site's HTML to determine the best possible resolution icon. And if no icon is available, it serves a decent fallback, so you never end up with a broken image. And finally, it's dead-simple to use. You simply use the hostname like so:<p><a href="https://icon.horse/icon/ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">https://icon.horse/icon/ycombinator.com</a><p>Anyway, hope you also get some use out of it. I'm around if anyone has any questions :)