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Favicons are those tiny icons that you see on your browser tab while visiting any website. For example. I have added Chrome Story’s logo as favicon. The latest new tab page design puts favicons in the spotlight. Chrome at the moment does not support SVG files as favicons instead of it being a very popular request.

The bug submitted to track this feature is popular, with 180+ user votes requesting for this feature. I have multiple threads on all the major tech discussion forums where people are wondering why SVG favicons are not working in Chrome when it works fine on Firefox and Edge.

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Finally, today, I spotted a Chromium code commit adding basic support to this feature:

Basic support for SVG favicons

Add a DecodeSVG API to Blink’s WebImage to provide for decoding, parsing

and rendering of a blob of (hopefully) SVG data.

In the process, relocate WebImage to public/web (from public/platform),

since that makes it easier to interface with SVGImage (which is in the

“core complex”), and there appears to be no strong ties on the WebImage

interface as such to have it in public/platform.

This may not interest us, regular Chrome users. However, this will be a piece of very exciting news for web developers and web designers. You can see a lot of articles explaining why SVG is better than PNG. According to the learned, SVG is a newer and powerful format suited for the web than PNG or other formats.

SVG images can remain clear and crisp in any resolution or size. This makes it a perfect fit for favicons because most of the time, favicons are viewed as tiny images on the corner of your browser tabs.

Are you a developer who knows about the benefits of using SVG format? Drop-in a comment.