Safari homepage/startpage icons have gone grey

Question

Level 1

18 points

Safari homepage/startpage icons have gone grey

Hi folks!

I have a question. Most of the icons on the Safari homepage have gone grey, or how to say it. It looks like they have not been reloaded as they should after I cleared cache, buffers and history. So that was when the problem started. My Macbook Pro have been restarted several times after that, and the Safari app have been restarted even more times. But, most of the startpage icons are still greyed out even how much I restart and what not.

In the picture below you can see what I mean, many are grey. They do still work as they should. If I press one of them, they work just like normal. But it is not pretty, and it is annoying with those grey buttons. As you see, their logos have disappeared too.

My Safari is in norwegian language. And the picture show the Safari homepage or startpage or what it is called in english. And "Favoritter" means "favorites".

How can I get the greyed out icons back again?

Thank you all in advance!

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.4

Posted on Jun 25, 2021 9:04 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

R.Thomassen Author

Level 1

18 points

Jun 25, 2021 11:20 AM in response to R.Thomassen

The problem was solved by pressing "Empty caches" in the Develop menu. After that the icons suddenly started to come back all by itself, and does not disappear when restarting Safari. There are only some that haven't come back yet.

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Answer 2

dominic23

Level 10

83,916 points

Jun 25, 2021 9:21 AM in response to R.Thomassen

This happens when history is cleared, caches emptied or cookies removed.

Try revisiting those sites again.

Go step by step and test.

1. Quit Safari, launch Safari holding the Shift key down.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203987

2. Startup in Safe Mode. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/start-up-your-mac-in-safe-mode-mh21245/mac.

Quote:

It also does a basic check of your startup disk, similar to using First Aid in Disk Utility.

And it deletes some system caches, including font caches and

the kernel cache, which are automatically created again as needed

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Answer 3

R.Thomassen Author

Level 1

18 points

Jun 25, 2021 10:24 AM in response to R.Thomassen

I now discovered that it seems to work to add those pages to the Startpage again. I tested with one of them, and it worked. So that is a solution, deleting the old icons and add new ones.

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Answer 4

R.Thomassen Author

Level 1

18 points

Jun 25, 2021 10:21 AM in response to dominic23

Thank you so much for your reply. But unfortunately, it did not solve the problem.

I have done the startup in Safe Mode, quit Safari and launched again holding the Shift key down, visited all those sites again, checked for both system and program updates, but no, everything is just the same.

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Answer 5

Kalsta

Level 1

55 points

Jul 21, 2021 3:51 PM in response to R.Thomassen

A month on, how is it going? Has this been a permanent fix for you?

The same problem has plagued me for many months. A couple of months ago I found another discussion which discussed where the icons are stored, so I tried deleting them from the Finder. I had some limited success at the time, but the results were still patchy and unpredictable, and it got worse again over time.

Selecting 'Empty Caches' in the Develop menu today and revisiting all the sites has restored icons to many of my favourites, but it has not restored colour to any of the letters, so about half of them are still just grey letters.

It's frustrating, because the icons and colours are key to guiding your eye to the one you're looking for. Without them, you really lose that efficiency—typing into the search bar would probably be quicker.

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Answer 6

R.Thomassen Author

Level 1

18 points

Jul 23, 2021 4:01 AM in response to Kalsta

Hi Kalsta!

No, it was unfortunately not a permanent fix. But I don't have as much as half of them grey. Suddenly today my Yahoo mail icon got its color back after being grey for ages. And suddenly today my two NRK icons (Norwegian broadcaster with news and TV) have a logo for NRK Sport (!?). Very strange since I hate sport and never ever have visited NRK Sport. Those icons are living their own life, for sure.

I did have more or less the same problems as you. It was fixed at first, but then started to get grey again and with disappearing logos. But never as bad as before. I did not try to fix it several time, I just gave up. Why? Because I have a bigger problem that I have no idea how to solve. When opening a new tab, it often freeze Safari for a while (like roughly halv of the time). That is extremely annoying. And on top of that I have to crash Safari several times during the day because everything freezes. I can't remember exactly, but when pressing "report" to Apple, I get this crash report saying something with too many stacks or something. And I can't play movies or TV-show from a specific Norwegian site. Safari just can't load the movies, even though that the site says that for Mac, Safari is the best to use and should work as long as it is updated. But it doesn't on my machine, so something is wrong and I have no idea how to fix it, not even how to search forums for a fix. When visiting that site, I have to use another browser. And I don't like them, not at all. I love Safari, but hate all the problems that I have with it. And I forgot to mention Safari is really slow because of Adguard. I have tried several adblockers, either they don't work to get rid of the GDPR warnings or the are slow as Adguard. Everything just works perfectly when using the Opera browser. I want Safari to work just as good, but yes, I sort of have given up since I'm not a computer engineer or something.

I'm now downloading the Big Sur update, I hope that will fix some issues with grey icons, freezing problems and such. We'll see. I don't have too high hopes though. But maybe, since I have reported a lot of the crashes to Apple, they might have fixed things.

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Answer 7

Kalsta

Level 1

55 points

Jul 25, 2021 9:29 PM in response to R.Thomassen

R.Thomassen wrote:

Those icons are living their own life, for sure.

Haha… yes indeed they are. Today, most of my icons are gone again, but two letters have randomly regained their colour. Like you, I have given up trying to make sense of it.

I don't have your other issues with Safari. I use Magic Lasso ad blocker, which occasionally blocks a legitimate site from loading (in which case I just bypass it), but mostly seems to work okay.

I've been running Big Sur for some time, so I don't imagine it'll fix your grey icon issue. I just updated to 11.5—same problems. Might be time to submit a bug report to Apple.

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