I had the following in my code but after I tried removing it, the request still shows up. I also noticed the request usually occurs right after document complete gets sent.
Do all browsers automatically request this icon by default? If not, which browsers do and which browsers do not request it?
For anybody who reads this, you can get that little icon in your browser URL bar by adding favicon.ico to your root directory of your website.
Yes, most Browser do that nowadays. With the code you wrote you can reference any location for the favicon. If it is absent, the Browser tries to fetch it from the domains root instead (www.example.com/favicon.ico)
I don’t know of any method, to suppress the Browser-Request at all.
Actually the Wikipedia article has a matrix of Browser support, even splitted by Mime-Type support.