While I’ve tried many different ways of making favicons, I prefer — and would recommend — creating PNGs and then converting them using png2ico. I’m still on the fence whether bundling a 32x32 pixel version pays off. On one hand, it’s “invisible” and available in cases where it’d make sense; on the other hand, it’s just extra bits to send down the wire.

Here’s a handy Catfish plugin for Jquery. The author’s site seems to have disappeared, so I can’t comment there, but the one big thing to fix in this is to include a “speed fix”, which smoothes the jerkiness in the IE6 expression-based workaround.

Sitepoint’s original Catfish implementation was great, but big and slow pages tend to react badly with their IE6 workaround. Another approach is to use expressions to emulate position: fixed.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style type="text/css">

body { background: url(hack) fixed; } /* 'speed fix', fixes the jerkiness of IE6 */
#catfish {
    position: absolute;
    top: expression(
        offset = parseInt(catfish.offsetHeight),
        document.documentElement.scrollTop + document.documentElement.clientHeight - offset + 'px'
    );
}

</style>
<![endif]-->

I ran into some strange security errors with Thickbox and Flash in (surprise, surprise) IE6. Thickbox’s forums clued me into suspecting the problem had to do with SWFObject. The solution was to give the SWFObject’s script a defer attribute.

There’s still the issue of how much memory Thickbox causes IE6 to hog, but at least it’s working.