Tales of Favicons and Caches – Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Tales of Favicons and Caches – Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers [pdf]

cs.uic.edu

33 pointsblindm4 comments

Even ignoring the privacy implications, the aggressive nature of the favicon cache annoys me. I have a personal site I like to have linked on my devices, including my iPhone. I made the mistake of bookmarking an early version without a favicon. Now, no matter what I do, short of a reset of the device I suppose, the bookmark in Safari has no favicon on it.

In the end it doesn't matter, but still, it annoys me every time I see it.

That doesn't sound right to me. How deeply have you dug into the problem? Have you cleared cache? Do you know (from logs) if mobile safari is requesting the favicon? Have you connected a remote debugger to safari to see if there is a problem with your icon, or asked someone else to load your site on mobile safari? Have you tried using js to rewrite the favicon at runtime?

It pains me to hear someone give up on something like this.

I tried clearing cache, history, all the Safari things I could find. I tried adding more "apple-touch-icon" resolutions. Every "is your favicon good?" site I could find said it was fine. It works just fine on my iPad (and every other non Apple device I have). It works on my SO's iPhone running the same version of iOS, and same screen size. The iPhone shows the favicon when I go to tab-switch mode. It shows the correct image if I create a link on my Home Screen. It will not show the favicon on my favorites page.

And yeah, given how quickly the bug was closed that I opened, I'm guessing Apple decided I'm full of it too.

At some point, it's not worth it any more.

I keep the link around on my iPhone for when I get bored and try to debug it from time to time, but really I'm mostly curious if iOS will ever decide to do the right thing.

Safari has extremely aggressive favicon cache. I've seen it happen multiple times on large production websites that the favicon doesn't update for months.

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