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.
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.