Favicons in iOS 13 Safari

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Favicons in iOS 13 Safari

I know this is a perennial topic, but I have yet to find an answer. Until a few days ago, the icon on the tabs for my site's pages displayed correctly in Safari. Now it's decided to display the Amazon "a" icon instead. I have never set the Amazon icon as my favicon, so Safari must have picked it up from when I looked at some Amazon pages on my phone. You'd think that clearing the cache would solve the problem but it doesn't. I have cleared all web history both via Safari settings and the browser itself. I have rebooted Safari and rebooted the phone. I've turned iCloud on and off for Safari. Nothing will remove the stubborn Amazon icon.

Strangely, the Home Screen and bookmark icons display correctly. It's just the little icon next to the title at the top of the tab.

The only workaround I have found would require renaming all the pages on my site or create new ones - then the correct icon usually appears. But that's intolerable.

Somehow the wrong favicon has supplanted the correct one. I could understand it if it was an old icon that I'd put in the root directory of my site, but it isn't. The problem is almost certainly with Safari as the icons display correctly with Firefox and other browsers. Anyone else had something similar and/or solved it? Help gratefully appreciated.

Posted on Jan 12, 2020 5:10 AM

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NeilPrague Author

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Jan 21, 2020 1:45 AM in response to NeilPrague

In reply to my own post: hardly a flood of replies, but in case anyone has the same question and stumbles upon this, I do have an answer of sorts. The correct tab icons for my site's pages returned gradually over a few days, all except (surprisingly, and annoyingly) that for the home page. Nothing I did could speed the process up.

I have no idea why the icon should have been replaced by one I have never used for my site. Real Favicon Generator's favicon checker shows that I have all the correct files present and declared in the root directory of my site. It appears that the only thing you can do is be patient. I hope this will save someone the time I wasted on endless cache clearings, reboots, and linking and unlinking to the cloud - not to mention tinkering with the relevant HTML links in my pages and re-uploading the favicon files to the root directory.

This is definitely a safari iOS issue. Firefox, Chrome (desktop and mobile), Safari for desktop and even creaky old Internet Explorer picked up the correct icon almost immediately and if it disappears or becomes corrupted, a simple history deletion is all that's required to reinstate it. It's obvious that Safari iOS has somehow associated the wrong icon with my site and stored the information in a place that's inaccessible to users. It's a trivial issue but also an irritating one, and a definite area for improvement.

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Favicons in iOS 13 Safari

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