Star Emoji Favicon — Free, Fast & Private
A star is the oldest favourite-marker on the web, which makes it the most legible shorthand there is for ratings, bookmarks and saved items. Five points is geometrically simple, so it holds its shape much further down the size ladder than detailed emoji manage. The cost is that it is generic to the point of near-invisibility.
A review platform, a wishlist, or any product whose central verb is favouriting something. It misleads on astronomy, where visitors expect a celestial object and get a rating symbol, and it misleads on anything touching military rank or national flags, where a five-pointed star carries political weight it simply does not carry in a bookmarks bar. It also implies a rating system, so a site without one will feel subtly off.
Star in a crowded tab strip
The star is instantly recognisable and instantly anonymous. Its collisions are severe: the glowing star, the white medium star, the sparkles and the eight-pointed star are all yellow radial shapes and all effectively identical at 16 pixels. If any of those is in the same window, nobody picks yours out, which is a real cost for a mark whose whole job is being picked out.
What star looks like at 16 pixels
Beside a page title it reads as a solid yellow convex blob with visible corners, and that is genuinely enough. The five points round off slightly at 16 pixels but the alternation between point and valley survives, and that alternation is what separates a star from a circle. There is no interior detail to lose because there never was any. Close to the ideal case at 16 pixels: solid yellow, one convex shape, no interior detail left to lose.
Where vendors disagree about star
The main variation is gloss. Apple adds a specular highlight in the upper left that makes the star look three-dimensional; Noto and several others draw it flat. The flat versions are marginally more legible small because no bright patch competes with the outline. Point sharpness varies too, with some vendors drawing noticeably fatter points than others.
Where the glyph itself comes from
Your star icon is drawn on your device by your own colour emoji font, so it matches your platform rather than being a consistent cross-platform design. MiniPx ships no emoji artwork. Emoji are colour glyphs, so the .ico carries colour PNG payloads with alpha.