How do I force a favicon refresh?

I have a Grails application running locally using its own tomcat and I have just changed the favicon for a new one. Problem is that I can not see it in any browser. The old favicon shows up or I get no favicon at all, but not my new one. I do not think this is a Grails issue per se, more an issue with favicons.

What is supposed to happen with favicons? How are they supposed to work? I have numerous bookmarks in my browser which have the wrong icons and they never seem to get refreshed. How do I force the server/browser to stop caching them? It seems pretty silly to always cache them given they are normally only 16x16. Why not just upload them with every visit to the page? It is not exactly a huge overhead.

To refresh your site's favicon you can force browsers to download a new version using the link tag and a query string on your filename.
This is especially helpful in production environments to make sure your users get the update.

<link rel="icon" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico?v=2" />

Adapted from lineofbird's answer beloew, you can do the following:

1. Go directly to the favicon url in the address bar by typing in its address e.g.

   • www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico
   • www.yoursite.com/apple-touch-icon.png
   • etc.

2. Navigate to the url by pressing Enter

3. Refresh with Ctrl+F5

4. Restart your browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox)

This answer has not been given yet so I thought I'd post it. I looked all around the web, and didn't find a good answer for testing favicons in local development.

In current version of chrome (on OSX) if you do the following you will get an instant favicon refresh:

1. Hover over tab
2. Right Click
3. Select reload
4. Your favicon should now be refreshed

This is the easiest way I've found to refresh the favicon locally.

By destroying the file your browser uses to store old favicons, you can force new ones to be loaded.

1. Close your browser. Make sure there are no longer browser processes running (e.g. check Task Manager for chrome.exe or firefox.exe).
2. Navigate to where your browser stores user files:
   • For Chrome, go to the Chrome data directory.
   • For Firefox, go to the Firefox profile folder.
3. Delete the favicon cache.
   • For Chrome, remove Favicons and Favicons-journal
   • For Firefox, remove favicons.sqlite

This will almost definitely work. If not:

• Possibility 1: An update to your browser has changed how the favicon cache works. Please edit this answer with new instructions.
• Possibility 2: Your favicon problem has nothing to do with overaggressive caching. It may instead be a resource-loading problem – using Developer Tools, make sure the new favicon is downloading properly.

Rename the favicon file and add a link in the HTML head element with the new name, such as:

<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon2.ico" />

If you use PHP you could also use the MD5-Hash of the favicon as a query-string:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico?v=<?php echo md5_file('favicon.ico') ?>" />

This way the Favicon will always refresh when it has been changed.

As pointed out in the comments you can also use the last modified date instead of the MD5-Hash to achieve the same thing and save a bit on server performance:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico?v=<?php echo filemtime('favicon.ico') ?>" />

In Chrome on Mac OS X one can remove file with favicon cache

${user.home}/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Favicons 

Depending on the browser they are handled differently, but typically I find that going to the default page of the site, and doing a hard refresh. CTRL + F5 (or ⌘ Command + SHIFT + F5 on macOS), will typically get it to update.

Well, overhead is overhead, but yes, not too big.

Also, browsers are sometimes "greedy" about cached files. You could clear cache and/or restart your browser and may see the change. If that fails though...

My cheapo solution is to:

1. Visit your file at http://example.com/favicon.ico in your browser.
2. Delete the favicon.ico from your webroot.
3. Visit http://example.com/favicon.ico again in a browser, verify it's missing.
4. Upload new one to your webroot.
5. Visit http://example.com/favicon.ico again in a browser, verify it's the new one.

If that sequence doesn't work, then something else is going on.

ON MAC: ⌘ + Shift-R or hold down Ctrl and click the reload button in the browser.

More than likely a web browser issue. You will have to delete your cache from your browser, close your browser and reopen it. That should fix it.

I don't believe your favicons will get refreshed on your favorites until you revisit that page, and assuming that you had previously cleared your browsers cache.

Your web browser will not go out to the internet to check for a new favicon on its own... thank goodness.

For Internet Explorer, there is another solution:

1. Open internet explorer.
2. Click menu > tools > internet options.
3. Click general > temporary internet files > "settings" button.
4. Click "view files" button.
5. Find your old favicon.ico file and delete it.
6. Restart browser(internet explorer).

Try Opening In a New Tab

I tried many of the things above (resetting cache, refreshing, using the link tag, etc), I even checked my .htaccess file and reset the ExpiresByType variable.

But this is what finally worked for me in both Chrome (25.0.x) and Safari (6.0.1):

1. Flushing cache
2. Hard-linking the favicon with the <link> tag
3. Navigating to mysite.com/favicon.ico
4. Opening mysite.com in a new tab

(Up until step 3, refreshing in the same tab kept reproducing the old icon.)

For Chrome on macOS, if you don't want to delete the entire Chrome favicon database as suggested already here, you can delete only the conflicting icons:

1. Quit Chrome
2. Load the favicons database (using sqlite here):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Favicons

3. Search for the file that is causing issues

select * from favicons where url = 'http://mysite.dev/favicon.ico';

4. If you are happy with the output:

delete from favicons where url = 'http://mysite.dev/favicon.ico';

Alternatively, you can search for a pattern that you can reuse to delete multiple entries:

3. Search for multiple files that are causing issues

select * from favicons where url like 'http://mysite.dev%';

4. And again if you are happy with what this returns:

delete from favicons where url like 'http://mysite.dev%';

5. Type .exit and hit return to quit sqlite
6. Restart Chrome

Chrome Version: 68.0.3440.106

Just restart Chrome (in your address bar): chrome://restart

When you request the favicon from Google, you can take a look at the response headers.

Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:35:02 GMT
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:01 GMT
Expires: Fri, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:01 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Age: 7

If you put an "Expires: " header on the response, client browsers will re-request the icon after that timestamp. While doing active development, you could set the expires timestamp to a second or two in the future, and always have it fetch this, although that's a poor longterm plan.

Chrome's favicon support is buggy - disregard this answer

I wrote this answer under the impression that this is what it took to refresh favicons in Google Chrome. However, it turns out that this only works for the first five minutes or so, until the icon gets irretrievably lost in Chrome's history synchronization.

Original answer

You don't have to clear your cache, restart your browser, or rewrite your HTML - you just need to change the icon's URL, once, so that the browser will forget the previously-cached icon.

Assuming that you've defined your icon via <link> elements in your page's <head>, you can do that by running this standard-JS one-liner in the console:

[].slice.call(document.querySelectorAll('head>link[rel$="icon"]')).map(function(ln){ln.href+='?v=2'});

For a more advanced implementation of this that can automatically do this for end users in production, see freshicon.js.

I recently restored my bookmarks and was looking for a way to restore the FavIcons without visiting each page. My search brought me to this thread.

For those in a similar circumstance merely download the FAVICON RELOADER addon. Once installed you will find the "reload favorite icons" command in your BOOKMARKS dropdown menu.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/faviconreloader/?src=api

If you are using PHP .. then you can also use this line.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico?v=<?php echo time() ?>" />

It will refresh your favicon on each page load.

If you are just interested in debugging it to make sure it has changed, you can just add a dummy entry to your /etc/hosts file and hit the new URL. That favicon wouldnt be cached already and you can make sure you new one is working.

Short of changing the name of the favicon, there is no way you can force your users to get a new copy

This is a workaround for the chrome bug: change the rel attribute to stylesheet! Keep the original link though. Works like a charm:

I came up with this workaround because we also have a requirement to be able to update customer's sites / production code and I didn't find any of the other solutions to work.

This works for Chrome:

• on Mac: delete file

  ${user.home}/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Favicons

• on Windows: delete files

  C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Favicons C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Favicons-journal

source

Just change this filename='favicon1.ico'

Close all Google Chrome windows

Adding one more answer that I do not see here. I tried flushing my Google Chrome cache, reloading the tab, refreshing the tab, opening in a new tab, and even opening a new window. Nothing worked for me. What did finally work for me was to close all Google Chrome windows (if you're like me, you probably have 3+ windows with a bunch of tabs, and maybe even have more windows/tabs in another desktop, don't forget those!). Once all of your windows are closed, then try opening a fresh new window and reloading your site.

Hope this helps someone!

Bonus tip: If you'd like to get all your windows back, you can press "Ctrl + Shift + Up Arrow + T" to get your windows and tabs back.

Simple,

1: I don't want to fiddle around with codes (ps my site builder doesn't use codes, it uses "upload file" button and it does it itself)

2: I tried the CTRL+F5 and it doesn't work for me so....

I HAVE A SOLUTION:

IE: Clear All browser history and cookies by going to the settings cog O

Chrome: Go to the menu in the top right corner below the X that looks like a = , then go to settings, history, CLEAR BROWSING DATA and check all of the boxes that apply (I did history, cookies and empty the catche from the beginning of time)

I know this is a really old question but it is also one that is still relevant, though these days applies only to mozilla. (I have no idea what explorer does coz we don't code for non standard browsers).

Chrome is well behaved if one includes an icon tag in the header.

Although mozilla are well aware of the issue, as usual, they never fix the annoying small stuff. Even 6 years later.

So, there are two ways of forcing an icon refresh with firefox.

1. Have all your clients uninstall firefox. Then re-install.

2. Manually type just the domain in the url bar - do not use http or www just the domain (mydomain.com).

This assumes of course that your ns records include resolution for the domain name only.

Using "Empty Caches" from the "Develop" menu is the only thing that worked for me on Safari 17.

Safari on MacOS Safari 17.1

None of the offers solution worked for me, except doing this:

• Enable the Developer Menu in Safari Preferences
• Choose "Empty Cache"
• Restart browser

Also make sure you put the full image URL not just its relative path:

http://www.example.com/images/favicon.ico

And not:

images/favicon.ico

Here's how I managed it with a simply animated favicon and FireFox 3.6.13 (beta version) It will probably work for other versions of FireFox as well, let me know if it doesn't. It's basically artlung's solution, but addressing the .gif file as well:

1. I opened by FTP program, downloaded my favicon.ico AND favicon.gif files,
2. then DELETED them from my server's files.
3. Then I opened them in my browser as artlung suggested: http://mysite.com/favicon.ico AND http://mysite.com/favicon.gif Once those addresses loaded and displayed 404 error pages ("page not found")
4. I THEN uploaded both files back onto my server, and PRESTO - the correct icons were instantly displayed.