How to be sure that IE10/11/Edge do not use the “tile” icon for the address bar/tab icon?

Question

Is there a way to force Internet Explorer and Edge to use a particular favicon for the address bar/tab icon?

In general I'm using a different design (with a wider margin) for "live tile" (or whatever Microsoft calls them)... and for some reason these browsers keep choosing one of those images (defined in browserconfig.xml or one of the Apple icons... not sure) to use in the address bar.

This is not what I want, because the one in the address bar/tab icon needs to have a smaller margin and transparent background.

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Is there a safe and consistent method to say "use this icon for the address/tab bar icon", and "use this icon for the tile or whatever?"

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EDIT: Another acceptable workaround for this would be if there was a way to specify that the images with a background/margin would ONLY be used for "tile" so that the others would be favicon(s) only? I don't fully understand what logic IE/Edge use to choose which icon to display.

Answer 1

The favicon package generated by RealFaviconGenerator behaves the way you want: In its tabs, Edge picks the classic "desktop" icon, while it uses the tile icons for sites added to home screen. More precisely, Edge is using the classic 32x32 PNG icon as the tab icon.

I advice you to first run the compatibility test with Edge on your machine to make sure it behaves as described above (I didn't have a Surface tablet or something like this to test it).

Full disclosure: I'm the author of RealFaviconGenerator.