Why is Chrome searching for my favicon.ico when I serve up a file from ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I have a controller in MVC serving up images from a database.

EDIT: This still happens if I serve up a file over completely standard means in MVC.

Every time I request my image, Google Chrome also searches for my favicon.ico.

To avoid unnecessary discussions about other things "I should also care about" let us assume I do not care for caching whatsoever in this example and I shall always return HTTP response 200 with the file.

In my controller I return the following:

return File(fileBytes, contentType);

After inspecting Fiddler 2, the following response is generated:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: public
Content-Type: image/gif
ETag: oYu19wKo+KEHkyxZQ2WXAA==
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 1.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:48:45 GMT
Content-Length: 29344

By comparison, this is the response in Fiddler from Google when I request (for the first time) the Google logo:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: image/gif
Last-Modified: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 19:42:34 GMT
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:50:54 GMT
Expires: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:50:54 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Server: gws
Content-Length: 8706
Age: 2

However, in Chrome after getting my image Chrome attempts to find my favicon.ico. It does not try this after requesting the Google logo.

Any ideas why this might be happening? From my understanding on HTML, the answer must be in the response header because surely that is all the client has to go on? Please correct me!

EDIT 2: It seems a lot of people have completely misunderstood the problem. The problem is not the lack of a favicon and the erroring requests in MVC - it's the problem of requesting a favicon when only an image is being loaded, with a content type of "IMAGE/JPEG", as opposed to a webpage with a content type of "TEXT/HTML"!!

Answer 1

This has nothing to do with MVC. I am using webforms with a custom built log service and I stumbled upon this post wondering why I had continuous 'File does not exist' errors in my logs. This is locally on my development machine, I have no favicon.ico files in my projects, and I have tried IE, Firefox and Google trying to see which browser is the guilty party.

Every request from Google Chrome to my apps makes a request for a favicon.ico. I had to start logging browser locally to determine that it was in fact googles browser that is the culprit. I'd contact google if it bothers you. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't some new trojan infecting my chrome.

Answer 2

The actual answer: It's a known, verified bug. *(recently fixed!... maybe?)

Looks like a known, longstanding issue with Chrome: http://crbug.com/39402

If you want it fixed sooner, star the issue. More people starring the issue will likely increase its priority and possibly get it fixed faster.

---

****UPDATE 1***: As of May 15 of this year (2013)--four years after this question was asked--it looks like the issue has been fixed in version 29: http://crbug.com/39402#c47

Feel free to undo all your hacks and workarounds. :]

****UPDATE 2 (2015-01)***: This is apparently still an issue for some users, according to the same issue link. :/