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.
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favicon
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.
In Chrome on Mac OS X one can remove file with favicon cache
${user.home}/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Favicons
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:
This is the easiest way I've found to refresh the favicon locally.
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:
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.
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:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Favicons
select * from favicons where url = 'http://mysite.dev/favicon.ico';
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:
select * from favicons where url like 'http://mysite.dev%';
delete from favicons where url like 'http://mysite.dev%';
.exit and hit return to quit sqliteI 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.
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 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):
<link> tagmysite.com/favicon.icomysite.com in a new tab(Up until step 3, refreshing in the same tab kept reproducing the old icon.)
Rename the favicon file and add an html header with the new name, such as:
<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon2.ico" />
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)
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.
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.
Have all your clients uninstall firefox. Then re-install.
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.
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
Just change this filename='favicon1.ico'
Simon, I suppose there's a reason none of the other answers is accepted so far. Thus I believe this could be a Grails issue nevertheless - Especially if you're using the 'Resources Plugin'.
If your plugins provide a favicon (which - illogically - many do), they might override the one you desired to use - given yours is in a plugin itself.
If deleting the favicon from all your plugins temporary resolves the issue then you're very likely experiencing this:
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
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 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') ?>" />
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.
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
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, will typically get it to update.
Please follow below steps to change app icon:
<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="abc.ico">Alternatively, rename your icon file with favicon.ico and replace it in the directory.
By destroying the file your browser uses to store old favicons, you can force new ones to be loaded.
chrome.exe or firefox.exe).Favicons and Favicons-journalfavicons.sqliteThis will almost definitely work. If not:
Ok, after 10 minutes of trying, the easy way to fix it is close to that of the line of birds
Chrome Version: 68.0.3440.106
Just restart Chrome (in your address bar):
chrome://restart
If the problem continues despite of applying some steps above try to restart the IIS Server. Hope this helps...
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:
For Internet Explorer, there is another solution:
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
It may be useful to just a few people, but I had the same problem and discovered that it was related to file permessions, so I gave it a 777 permission and it worked, of course after you're sure the problem it's there, make sure to change back the permissions to safer values.
Source: Stackoverflow.com
