In iOS 7 an icon view of all Safari favorites are shown when tapping the address/search field.
Amongst my favorites is a bookmark for www.google.com.
The icon for this bookmark keeps changing to seemingly random icons, but also other websites I have visited. Is this intentional or a bug? Perhaps infection?
In either case, it is annoying and feels like a virus.
iPhone 5, iOS 7.0.2
There is no known malware of any kind capable of infecting an iPad (or any other iOS device), unless it has been jailbroken. So it's not a virus.
As for what the cause is, I can't for the life of me figure out what you're talking about. What icon view of Safari favorites are you referring to? Can you be more specific about where you're seeing this, and what the icons look like?
I have seen the same issue.
When you first run Safari the Favourites page is displayed which contains icons for each of the sites in your Favourites list. One of mine is also for Google and this has changed icons at least twice - typically to reflect sites that I have been to following a Google search.
Cheers
Paul
I also see the same issue with google.com bookmarks.
Given that bookmarks for other Google services return the default Safari icon, I guess Google haven't updated their sites to the relevant iOS7 specs. and must be somehow drawing through to the icons of visited pages. Bookmarking Google on a regular desktop browser produces the correct more common favicon format.
Yes same here.
Google was a 'g' this morning. I searched for wikipedia, the icon was the wikipedia W next time i looked. But the other favicons are either stable or not there at all..
Same here. Clearly a bug. I'm sure it'll get fixed.
I have this problem too and it is very annoying. Right now my "icon" for Google is 'This Old House'. It points to Google so why is represented by a TV show I looked up days ago? My Amazon icon is something different every day. Some of my favorites icons say Oprah Winfrey or other titles that have nothing to do with them. Even the ones that appear to have a generic clock graphic don't always stay the same color. The only thing that stays the same is the order. What could possibly be the purpose of this? Please tell me there is a setting somewhere to fix this.
This is a bug with Safari in iOS 7. It appears that the favorites icon gets confused by redirection and does not honor the icon on the specific favorite page.
To replicate...
* Click on the + sign to get a new tab.
* Click on the Google icon.
* Search for Apple.
* Click on the first link to go to the Apple website.
* Click on the + sign to get another tab.
* Note that Google now has the Apple logo.
When you click on the Apple link from the Google search results page, you do not go directly to Apple's site. You first pass through something like this (truncated for readability)...
https://www.google.com/url?q=apple&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.apple.com%2F
This page does a redirect to the final destination.
What I suspect happens is Safari thinks it is going to a Google site when it hits the redirect page, then follows the redirect to get the icon.
This happens with Yahoo as well, but not so drastically. After a search on Yahoo, the Yahoo icon will be replaced by the Yahoo Search icon. Visiting Yahoo again will change the icon back to the Yahoo icon.
This kind of redirection pattern is pretty standard since it helps with analytics.
Appears to be fixed in 7.0.3.
This is still occurring on my iPad which has been updated to ios7.0.3
It still seems to happen for me on the iPad with iOS 7.0.3. I search for Apple and then visit the site from Google. Then the Google icon appears with the Apple logo. Maybe this is by design? :)
This doesn't seem to happen on the iPhone, so I'm not sure what the difference is.
Yes still a bug in IOS 7.0.3 on ipad2.
Safari/Apple please fix this
Well, nevermind. Still baroque for me, too, on 7.0.3. Took a little while for this bug to rear its sneaky head, but once it did, the icons are once again a dang mess.
On a slightly different note:
Is there a way to customize those bookmark icons in Safari ios7?
Yosemite on iMac, same problem with favorites icons, but not just with search engines...about half my favorites have had their unique logo icons replaced by the safari logo. I've tried deleting the entire sites from favorites, and then creating a new bookmark and they are still the safari logo.
It's not a virus, but it is a common action. Tell Apple Feedback about it and ask if they will do something about it, if you would like to see that done.
Product Feedback
Why are favorites in iOS 7 Safari changing icons?
