Safari not updating favicons dynamically

I think that you may be having two separate issues here. I have not been active in web development in several years but the .ico format was considered obsolete many years ago. You will have much better results with all modern browsers by doing some research and moving to .png and .svg versions and using the appropriate <link> tags in the head of your pages, or, just naming your touch icon files correctly and placing them directly in the site's server root. Do some searching for "favicon touch icons 2026" and you will find some good reference material. I found the following for example: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/how-to-favicon-in-2021-six-files-that-fit-most-needs

To answer you question, you as the developer or website owner, cannot in any way "push" new favicons to a visitor. That's not how the web works. The only way that favicons/touch icons can be updated is if the browser initiates a request for your page again. You cannot force that from your end. It's possible that some browsers occasionally fetch them on purpose to keep them updated. However, in general new icons are only going to reach the browser if the user requests the page again. I use several browsers on several platforms and have always had to click each and every one of my favorites on the bookmark toolbar to fetch new icons as necessary.

I finally found a solution that works but is really annoying. If you change the name of the favicon to something else then Safari will fetch it again and update the PWA. So now if I change it I just increment an integer like favicon-3.png

This is not a case of the user needing to fetch the site again or use png or svg. I’ve updated the favicon on my site using png. It updates on every other browser, but on safari it still shows the old one! If I go to the favicon link directly I can see the proper image, but safari, and more importantly the Home Screen PWA, will not update the favicon!

deleting the PWA and adding it again also does not work. It still shows the old icon that does not exist anywhere on the web anymore!

I even tried deleting safari history for the site, still no icon update!!

In my personal experience over the years Safari favicons have been unstable. For example, recently I had a favicon for a news site suddenly change to the favicon for my bank. The only solution was to clear all website data (which clears all favicons as well). I my opinion there is no solution that sticks.

I don't know if Safari has some restriction on the size or shape of favicons or if there is a W3C standard that some websites don’t conform to.