Favicons have gone from being just a graphic or an animated graphic to full fledged games thanks to Mathieu Henri who has created “Defender of the Favicon“. This favicon is a little different than the ones you will find here at FreeFavicon.com. The favicon is actually a Javascript that dynamically updates the favicon. It is playable but not viewable in all browsers. The best browsers to try the favicon game in are Opera 9.5, Opera 9.2 and FireFox 2. I was using Firefox 3 and it was working alright, other than the fact that I suck at Defender.
I was trying the site out in Firefox 3 on Ubuntu and it appeared to run fine. I also tried it on Firefox 2 on a Windows XP machine and it was pretty much identical. I could only ever play in the favicon. The instructions say that if you press Enter it should open in a canvas display but I could not get that to work on either machine.
Here is a short video of me trying to play Defender of the Favicon. Not easy to do but it is a creative use of the space. Perhaps a different game would be eaiser to play as a favicon. Pac-Man comes to mind or even Asteroids maybe.
This is a unique approach to creating a favicon and deserves to be recognized this week as the favicon of the week!