How to avoid infinite loop when trying to load a 404-Not-Found favicon in Chrome?

Question

I've read that Chrome keeps asking for the favicon in each page it visits (link), and if it doesn't find it (404 Not found) then Chrome enters in a infinite loop.

I'm afraid that is happening to my app, although it works fine with Firefox or Safari. I haven't found a way to prevent this after go through all the forums I could find.

The http headers before the problematic request is:

GET /url?file_id=0B0orkZUr6JxAdmViVmNuTG5XbFU HTTP/1.1
Host: glinksapp.appspot.com:443
Accept: image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Cookie: SID=DQAAAHABAACKf5HqkBRzvi3HwJrZJ1nW31wx9PEvsqASLQKFZts0Ux1pWFwk...[cut]
Referer: https://www.google.es/
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36
X-Chrome-UMA-Enabled: 1
X-Chrome-Variations: COS1yQEIl7bJAQiptskBCMG2yQEIm4TKAQj4hMoBCLeFygEIwoXKAQjRhcoB
X-Purpose: Instant

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
content-length: 0
content-type: text/html
date: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 08:59:56 GMT
location: https://drive.google.com/#folders/0B0orkZUr6JxAVk9xT3QxcXBpdWs
server: Google Frontend
status: 302 Found
version: HTTP/1.1

And this is the infinite loop in Chrome:

GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Host: drive.google.com:443
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Cookie: NID=67=fwmd6KsM_Y0xNrRMQlSSpVVmsKTgAi8v4AlG9A...[cut]
PREF=ID=ad9194453b59885b:FF=0:LD=en:TM=1373791886:LM=1373792185...[cut]
SID=DQAAAHABAACKf5HqkBRzvi3HwJrZJ1nWZBxbrbYxeGjE4p130PeYTaQhalIhrt6T-...[cut]
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36
X-Chrome-UMA-Enabled: 1
X-Chrome-Variations: COS1yQEIl7bJAQiptskBCMG2yQEIm4TKAQj4hMoBCLeFygEIwoXKAQjRhcoB

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
cache-control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
content-encoding: gzip
content-length: 117
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
date: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 08:59:56 GMT
expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
pragma: no-cache
server: GSE
status: 404 Not Found
version: HTTP/1.1
x-chromium-appcache-fallback-override: disallow-fallback
x-content-type-options: nosniff
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block

If you refresh the page, the app comes out from the loop.

My Java app's url is http://glinksapp.appspot.com and is hosted in Google App Engine. It is a drive app to open link files (webloc, url...) directly in Google Drive (something not provided by Google by default).

The question is: how to avoid entering in the 404 'Not found' loop when the app tries to reach 'drive.google.com/favicon.ico'?

Thx in advance.

Answer 1

Chrome and other browsers automatically request the favicon, but they don't enter an infinite loop when they get a 404 (which happens on a lot of sites, so that would be a gigantic problem). The link you posted says that Chrome on Android may request the apple-touch-icon files as well, but that's okay.

The HTTP 404 response you've pasted into your question looks totally fine. Your 302 redirect also looks fine. So I suspect the problem you're experiencing is something else, not related to the favicon.