How do I force a favicon refresh?

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" />

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

Go directly to the favicon url in the address bar by typing in it's address e.g. www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico www.yoursite.com/apple-touch-icon.png etc. Navigate to the url by pressing Enter Refresh with Ctrl+F5 Restart your browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox)

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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:

Hover over tab Right Click Select reload Your favicon should now be refreshed

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

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

Close your browser. Make sure there are no longer browser processes running (e.g. check Task Manager for chrome.exe or firefox.exe). Navigate to where your browser stores user files: For Chrome, go to the Chrome data directory. For Firefox, go to the Firefox profile folder. 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.

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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" />

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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') ?>" />

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

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

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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.

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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:

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

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

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For Internet Explorer, there is another solution:

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

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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.

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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):

Flushing cache Hard-linking the favicon with the tag Navigating to mysite.com/favicon.ico Opening mysite.com in a new tab

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

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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:

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

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

Search for the file that is causing issues

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

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:

Search for multiple files that are causing issues

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

And again if you are happy with what this returns:

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

Type .exit and hit return to quit sqlite Restart Chrome

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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.

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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.

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Chrome Version: 68.0.3440.106

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

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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

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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.

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