Why doesn't Safari show me favicons any more?

Dave, prior to my finding your great article on Can I selectively Remove Safari Favicon Icons? I took the brute force strategy of deleting all the cached icons in the Safari library folder so that the browser would see my new favicon. But now instead of showing the favicon.ico graphic, crazy Safari doesn't show me any favorite icons at all. What could be wrong?

Dave's Answer:

Ah yes, when in doubt, use the brute force method. Sounds a lot like my typical problem solving strategy, actually. :-)

I'm guessing that you followed some online directions that said something like "To remove the icon cache, type rm -rf ~/Library/Safari/icons in the Terminal window."

If you did this, then not only did you remove all the icon cache files as you desire, but you also removed the "icons" folder itself!

To fix this problem, quit Safari then recreate the folder:

$  mkdir ~/Library/Safari/icons
$

then make sure it has the right permissions:

$  chmod 700 ~/Library/Safari/icons0
$

then restart Safari and see what happens.

I'm betting that'll fix it for you!

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Categorized: Mac OS X Help (Article 3824, Written by Dave Taylor)
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Reader Comments To Date: 4

Jonathan said, on January 10, 2007 2:22 PM:

Dave,
I found your site by the almighty Google...I have a fzvicon question. Does an OS9 server have some issue with delivering favicon.ico to browsers? I have used the two lines of code that I know to link to a favicon.ico I still does not show. I admin about 7 other sites that run on everything from windows servers to free bsd servers and all show the fav icons. On the site I do for work, it does not display on any of the 6 browsers I have tried on Mac & Win. Do you have an answer to the question that haas haunted me for three months?

Thanks man,
Jonathan

Amy said, on October 9, 2008 10:55 AM:

I don't know what you mean by this. could you explain chmod 700 ? Thanks!

then make sure it has the right permissions:

$ chmod 700 ~/Library/Safari/icons0

Dave Taylor said, on October 9, 2008 9:26 PM:

Amy, file permissions, in Unix-land, are referred to as the "mode" of the file (for some obscure reason that everyone's now forgotten :-)

To change the permissions of the file, that is, to change what you can do with it from the command line, you need to change its mode: "chmod". (pronounce it "ch-mode" and you'll understand).

zach forshee said, on December 13, 2012 11:57 PM:

What do you know about the - kshee -project?????

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!

Why doesn't Safari show me favicons any more?

Reader Comments To Date: 4

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!

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