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JavaScript

Joseph Bertino
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Joseph Bertino
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 14,652 Points
Posted by Joseph Bertino
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Joseph Bertino
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 14,652 Points

Why is Firefox adding "favicon.ico" to my GET request?

When contacting localhost:3000 in Firefox, I get the success message "I Love Treehouse" returned by my Express server, but I see that in addition to the request GET http://localhost:3000 sent by my browser, a second request GET http://localhost:3000/favicon.ico is also sent, and the Express server returns a 404 response for this request. Why is this extra request being sent?

Here's my app.js

const express = require('express');

const app = express();

app.get('/', (request, response) => {
    response.send("I Love Treehouse!");
});

app.listen(3000);

1 Answer

Brandon White
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Brandon White
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Graduate 34,662 Points

Hi Joseph,

So a favicon is a little image that sits on the tab. For treehouse it's a little green shape, with a negative shape created from the outline of a frogs hand/leg(???).

In any case, they are so common that most browsers automatically ask the server for it when a get request is sent. But if your server doesn't have one, then it sends the browser a 404 (not found) response for that request.

It's not caused by an issue with your code, and there isn't a way to keep it from happening (as far as I know). I guess if you don't want to add a favicon to your server, you could write a route that accounts for that automatic request from the browser and send back a different response.

In any case, that's what's going on.