I have a report that favicon (the little TB square icon in tabs) isn’t working for a reader in Safari on the Mac, nor NetNewswire and Reeder, but is working in Safari in iOS. It works for me in Safari on the Mac (first screenshot below), but after our move to Cloudways, my Arc pinned tabs pointing at pages inside the TidBITS WordPress site sometimes flip back and forth between the TidBITS favicon and the WordPress favicon (second screenshot).
Thanks! To be clear, no one should be seeing the WordPress icon because only I’m using the backend. I was just sharing that to suggest that the move to Cloudways might have changed something with the favicon.
Safari 18.2: I dragged the URL to my bookmark bar beneath the URL window. The resulting favicon is the Wordpress favicon. In Bookmarks > Edit Bookmarks, the Wordpress favicon also shows.
Firefox 133.0.3: TB favicon
DuckDuckGo 1.118.1: a generic favicon that says “Ti”. Neither the WP or the TB favicon show.
Since Safari and DDG rely on Apple WebKit, perhaps the problem is related to macOS WebKit.
On Monterey I don’t see a favicon at all in Firefox. In Safari I see the TidBITS favicon. In Chrome I just see a generic world icon. Latest Firefox and Chrome, latest Safari that runs on Monterey.
I just updated the favicons on my site, and found: a) The whole favicon thing is a mess, and b) browsers seem to aggressively cache favicons, with no amount of cache cleaning getting rid of the them. They do time out after a bit, but that makes testing difficult.
When urlscan.io attempts to fetch “favicon-32x32.png” while scanning tidbits.com yields a 404 error from Cloudflare; ditto with the 16x16 version. urlscan doesn’t seem to attempt to fetch the icon from talk.tidbits.com, likely due to caching.
Using curl (things like curl -D /dev/tty 'https://tidbits.com/favicon-16x16.png' >/dev/null) I get a 404 for all 4 icons declared in the tidbits.com<head> section. I get a 200 for the two in the talk.tidbits.com head section. My guess is that people are seeing them on tidbits.com because of browser caching, once the caches time out they no longer will. And like @ron’s tests, the 404s are coming from Cloudflare.
Ah! I didn’t know about the aggressive browser caching.
I’ve now set the favicon in WordPress’s Appearance > Customize > Site Identity and uploaded several specifically sized favicon files to the public_html directory. Hopefully, that will take care of everything. It did get rid of the WordPress favicons I was seeing in Arc.
A funny little thing here, that I’ve had for quite some while, I do see the tidbits favicon on Safari on iOS, but the same favicon appears with the macupdate.com site as well.
