How to make a URL desktop shortcut have the page's favicon? Theoretically, it should do this automatically. In practice, sometimes it works, sometimes not. All the pages below have proper favicons, but only the O Globo and Amazon favicons made it to the desktop icon. (The former in a better way, as you can see.) I added them the usual way, with Menu -> Add -> Shortcut -> Bookmark.

This is a (rooted) Milestone running Motorola's official 2.2.1 update. These are the pages involved:


http://moglobo.globo.com
http://cracked.com
http://mobile.formula1.com
https://mobile.twitter.com
http://www.amazon.com
http://www.supervia.com.br


Any reason for that erratic behavior?
It has to do with the site having an icon for "apple-touch" defined in the page. for example O Globe has the following: 

&lt;link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="favicon.png" /&gt;


And it works. There are differences in how other versions of android handle this. Here is an article explaining some how this works a bit. There could also be a "catch 22" to this though, as I see that the mobile Twitter site does have the apple-touch-icon-precomposed but doesn't seem to show the icon. This could be because of something Motorola did differently in their modified version of Android, or it could just be a bug.

If the site does not define the icon, then you can use a tool like Any Cut to change the icon.