Safari on iPad displays incorrect favicons

Has anyone found a solution to the favicon errors that show up in Safari on the iPad, specifically on the Favorites bar (and sometimes the tabs)? Currently on my Favorites bar the Facebook bookmark shows the GMail icon while my YouTube bookmark displays the Facebook icon (but the Gmail bookmark shows the correct icon) and with 4 tabs open to youtube (I do that sometimes rather than making a short-term playlist) I have three showing the correct icon, but one showing the Facebook one. The correct ones are the ones that opened when I selected a video and chose "Open in Backround" while the one that's wrong I opened by clicking the bookmark to open youtube, then starting a video.


I've tried every suggestion I've been able to find and nothing's worked – including updating to iPadOS 26.1 sooner than I'd intended (I generally wait until at least the N.2 release before switching). Actually, to be fair, two of the more popular solution haven't so much not worked as been impossible to implement. Specifically the suggestion at the end of this thread https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ipados-15-2-1-safari-broken-favicons.2332259/ failed because after I changed the date to one in the future, I couldn't open any of the problem sites (Apple deemed them "not safe"). Also, the one here 256039314 did me no good because there was no entry named cdn-apple.com for me to delete. It's frustrating because I'd prefer to have my bookmarks display as icons only, but I obviously can't do that if the icons don't match the bookmarked sites.

iPad Air

Posted on Dec 1, 2025 3:55 PM

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2 replies

Dec 1, 2025 5:40 PM in response to TheMaeus

Update:

Managed to fix one of the two wrong icons. I searched my bookmarks and deleted all the ones for Facebook (had old ones pointing to specific groups/pages) and then created a new one – which now has the correct icon. Unfortunately, the same trick didn't fix the Youtube bookmark icon. I even tried bookmarking a video, which had the right icon, and then editing the bookmark. It showed the right icon initially, but reverted to the FB one as soon as I edited it to point to the YT homepage instead of the specific video. So weird – and annoying.

Dec 1, 2025 4:23 PM in response to TheMaeus

This has been an ongoing problem for years now, something Apple has consistently avoided dealing with. Favicons also fail to display at all for some websites, even if they display in other browsers.


No solution that I know of so you’ll just have to change your preference to have bookmarks display only as icons and live with it.



Safari on iPad displays incorrect favicons

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