How can the icons of pinned tabs in Safari be changed?

Try this -

1. Open the website you want to pin. e.g. www.apple.com

2. Bookmark it and save the bookmark name as 'Orange'

3. Pin the tab

You will see that Pin icon is 'O' instead of 'A'. Its not a good solution but could be helpful.

You bait me into wanting to use some 4letter words about your reply. First, you can not tell me to not compare Safari on Windows to Safari on current Mac, if in fact the current Mac OS has made changes which are not user oriented. Which is apparently the case, the Mac OS has made changes which are not improvements. Sorry u have to be so defensive about the de-evolution of the Mac.

Try this -

1. Open the website you want to pin. e.g. www.apple.com

2. Bookmark it and save the bookmark name as 'Orange'

3. Pin the tab

You will see that Pin icon is 'O' instead of 'A'. Its not a good solution but could be helpful.

You can't change the icons. It's up to the website to include a suitably-sized icon. When no such icon is available, Safari uses the first letter of the site name hard-coded into the site, which might not be the same as the short name displayed to you.

Now that Safari 9 is released, I would expect more sites to include the proper icon.

Then explain why on Safari on windows, the favorites bar shows icons and those icons are identical to the website's icon shown in the address bar. The address bar in Safari on the Mac shows an icon, but the Tab bar doesn't use it. To me this allowing the computer science weenies to do design not friendly to the user, precisely against the paradigm started by Steve Jobs on the Mac over 30 years ago. The technology know enables incredible display and visualization, and yet OS design is going backwards. This is my first Mac, but I envied the mac for years, but so disappointed that the company appears to have lost the customer focus on GUI.

Appledyte wrote:

Then explain why on Safari on windows, the favorites bar shows icons and those icons are identical to the website's icon shown in the address bar. The address bar in Safari on the Mac shows an icon, but the Tab bar doesn't use it. To me this allowing the computer science weenies to do design not friendly to the user, precisely against the paradigm started by Steve Jobs on the Mac over 30 years ago. The technology know enables incredible display and visualization, and yet OS design is going backwards. This is my first Mac, but I envied the mac for years, but so disappointed that the company appears to have lost the customer focus on GUI.

Safari for Windows hasn't been updated/developed since 2012. That's why it's different to the current version of Safari you can get on Macs. Don't compare them to one another.

Slow your roll. I'm not "defensive" about anything. If someone disagreeing with you about something is enough to make you want to break out George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words, you need to work on your anger management skills. I was trying to say that you can't really compare a browser developed for two different operating systems, particularly when they're not even the same brand. Safari for Windows is one animal....an extinct animal, to be precise. Safari for Mac is another. If you don't like the way Safari looks, download Firefox. You get icons on tabs in Firefox.

The pinned websites do not use the "Favicon" for display. It uses the first letter of the domain. So, if your OTRS website is hosted on www.ultrasensitive.com, then the pinned tab will be a U, not an O as the site is not named www.OpenSourceTicketingSystem.com. The website would have to provide the desired graphic. When no graphic is provided, the first letter of the second-level domain seems to what Apple has decided to use. If you pin the OTRS website, it will be an O with the pale blue theme color.

The favorites bar uses Favicons, but the pinned tabs do not. I imagine it would be easy to implement Favicons for the pinned tabs, but Apple did not. They implemented something else as is evident by pinning various sites that have valid, loaded favicons. You can find more information here: http://realfavicongenerator.net/blog/safaris-pinned-tabs-support-mac-os-x-el-cap itan/

Reading the article, it appears that Apple chose the format because it is "flat" as is the UI design of Yosemite and El Capitan.

There is a link in the article to a program that can create the appropriate icon for your company's OTRS server.

Slow your roll. I'm not "defensive" about anything. If someone disagreeing with you about something is enough to make you want to break out George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words, you need to work on your anger management skills. I was trying to say that you can't really compare a browser developed for two different operating systems, particularly when they're not even the same brand. Safari for Windows is one animal....an extinct animal, to be precise. Safari for Mac is another. If you don't like the way Safari looks, download Firefox. You get icons on tabs in Firefox.

You don't get it.

I thought this was about Pinned Tabs. Pinned Tabs are not "favorites" or part of the Favorites Bar.

Favicons do show up in Favorites bar. But, they don't show up on Pinned tabs and there is nothing you can do about that. You cannot tell Safari to use Favicons. The site must provide the Apple-desired graphic just like it does for Favicons.

If you are not seeing Favicons in your favorite bar links, then I'm not sure what is wrong. Here is an example of mine:

The Favicons show for the sites I have recently visited after having reset Safari. The default globe shows for sites that I have not visited.

Based on your posts, I'm pretty sure pinkstones "gets it" better than you do. Favorites are not Pinned Tabs. Pinned Tabs are not Favorites.

I don't get OS X or Safari on the Mac. That's why I'm here. I have yet to see an example of favicon on the favorites bar. It's true that favicons appear on a drop down menu, but not on the bar. If someone can add to my knowledge then great, but to say it's not appropriate for me to expect something that Ive seen on other browsers is not helpful. I searched in help and saw a thread where as of 8/15, favicons where not supported on the favorites bar and a user offered an extension to Safari which did that. Many people tore into Apple for this lack of functionality.

Appledyte wrote:

I don't get OS X or Safari on the Mac. That's why I'm here. I have yet to see an example of favicon on the favorites bar. It's true that favicons appear on a drop down menu, but not on the bar.

That is exactly true. Favicons do not appear on direct links on the Favorites bar, only text. There is absolutely nothing you can do about that. Just like there is nothing you can do about making a Favicon show on the Pinned tabs.

I explained how it works in the Favorites bar, with a picture to eliminate any ambiguity.

What I think you don't seem to understand is that Apple is removing most of the "rich" UI elements. Everything is extremely simplistic, including the Favorites bar.

In the immortal words of the Rolling Stones, "you can't always get what you want."

Barney, excellent response. I would be perfectly happy with Flavicons on the Favorites bar. However I have not determined how to do that and it does not work the way I would have expected it too.

One more thing, go back and read my previous response to you. Your response doesn't indicate that you did.