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:
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)
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.
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.
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" />
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:
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.
ON MAC:
⌘ + Shift-R or hold down Ctrl and click the reload button in the browser.
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).
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.
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 <link> 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.)
Chrome Version: 68.0.3440.106
Just restart Chrome (in your address bar):
chrome://restart
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
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
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.
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)
Just change this filename='favicon1.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:
I opened by FTP program, downloaded my favicon.ico AND favicon.gif files,
then DELETED them from my server's files.
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")
I THEN uploaded both files back onto my server, and PRESTO - the correct icons were instantly displayed.
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
Use query string at the end of the file path. Query string variable value must be different with every build.
if previous build is:
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico?v=v1" />
OR
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico?v=stringA" />
then next build should be:
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico?v=v2" />
OR
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico?v=stringB" />
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.
If the problem continues despite of applying some steps above:
try to restart the IIS Server.
I have an angularjs site deployed to IIS on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host inside my firewall. When I RDP into the server and, from there, navigate to
http://localhost/Foo
in IE11, everything behaves as one would expect;my page is served to the browser.
But, when I attempt to browse
http://servername/Foo
in IE11, I get an error thrown from line 1016 of angular.js
"Object doesn't support property or method 'querySelector'"
This only occurs in Internet Explorer.
Everything tested out fine in Chrome as well as Firefox.
Does anyone have a clue as to why this is happening and what I can do to fix it?
The solution to this problem was to add the
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1" />
tag as the first item in the Head.
The meta tag has to be the first tag in the head for IE to pick up edge mode; otherwise, it ignores the DOCTYPE that is supposed to instruct IE not to fall into quirks mode.
I had included the meta tag as an afterthought when I was deploying and had typed it in at the bottom of the head.
MSDN|Specifying Legacy Document Modes
The X-UA-Compatible header isn't case sensitive; however, it must appear in the header of the webpage (the HEAD section) before all other elements except for the title element and other meta elements.
The default Compatibility Settings in Internet Explorer cause IE to silently behave differently for internal sites and external sites.
Setting the X-UA-Compatible meta tag explicitly declares that browsers should be receiving your internal site in Edge mode without the requirement of administrating Compatibility Settings, but the header must be specified as the first tag in the head in order to have this effect.
Disable Compatibility view mode for your intranet and site that you're trying to access and this will solve your problem.
UPDATE: There is a workaround to the problem. It is to force IE10 into compatibility mode by including one of the following meta tags:
<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="IE=7" />
<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="IE=8" />
This is not really a perfect solution for various reasons, but it eliminates the problem at least.
ORIGINAL QUESTION:
I realised a couple of months ago that there is a problem with our Silverlight application in IE10 on Windows 8 (I have not tried the IE10 preview for Windows 7). When the asp.net page hosting our SL app first loads everything works fine and the application loads as expected. If I refresh the page immediately, it also reloads as expected. But: If I focus the Silverlight application by clicking in it and THEN hit F5, it just goes blank. It is like the plugin disappears completely. If I trace the requests using Fiddler I can see that no request is issued for the xap file. I have been hoping that this would be fixed in a patch release for IE10, but so far nothing has changed. I cannot find any information about this when I try googling it. It seems highly unlikely that I should be the first person to discovered it and I am quite surprised that I am not finding more information. To reproduce the issue:
Create a new Silverlight application
Add some sort of content to MainPage.xaml, like a Button or whatever
Run the app in IE10 (on Win8)
Click anywhere within the Silverlight application. This is just to focus the plugin.
Refresh the page (F5)
Result: The Silverlight application does not load and the page is blank.
A few observations:
After the steps above, no amount of refreshing will bring the application back.
After the steps above, if I re-enter the url into the address bar and hit Enter, the application loads as expected.
If I enable Compatibility View in IE, the app also loads as expected. Nothing I do will reproduce the bug when compatibility view is enabled.
Now to my questions:
Has anyone else observed this behaviour?
If so, have you found a workaround?
I'm seeing the same issue with my Silverlight application in IE 10.
I've tried adding the IE 8 compatibility meta tag suggested above, but this does not resolve the problem consistently. It seems to work only intermittently, after say every 5th refresh attempt?!
The only way I can see to work around this consistently is to force the Browser Mode into "IE 10 Compatibility View", and I don't think this can be done via page content (meta tag, etc.)? I've had to remove the IE 8 compatibility meta tag so that the "Compatibility View" button is available in the address bar, and then ask users to click the compatibility button, which is then remembered for the site. This results in the browser entering Browser Mode: "IE 10 Compat View" and Document Mode: "IE7 Standards". The refresh behaviour then works consistently as expected and as it used to.
This is a big problem for us. We've built our Silverlight app such that the browser refresh button is used to refresh pages/content within the app (the users stays logged in, etc.). It's really bad that we have to ask users to set our site to run in compatibility mode for the refresh functionality to work as expected.
Note that this still works as expected in Chrome. It seems silly that we might need to recommend that our users use Chrome because of this issue!
UPDATE:
A workaround for this seems to be to always load the Silverlight object into its hosting page dynamically using JavaScript.
E.g.
function onLoad() {
var silverlightControlHost = document.getElementById("silverlightControlHost");
silverlightControlHost.innerHTML = "<object ...
UPDATE 2:
Here is the latest code I use to work around this issue:
...
function unloadSilverlight() {
document.getElementById("silverlightControlHost").innerHTML = "";
}
function focusOnSilverlight() {
document.getElementById("silverlightObject").focus();
}
function onLoad() {
window.onbeforeunload = unloadSilverlight;
setTimeout(focusOnSilverlight);
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload=" onLoad() ">
...
I still had issues with the solution presented by Chris.
This works perfectly for me though:
window.onbeforeunload = function () {
var silverlightControlHost = document.getElementById("silverlightControlHost");
silverlightControlHost.innerHTML = "";
}
I solved the problem in a very easy way. I Wrote a javascript code at the end of the page (or after the object tag in where is your silverlight app) and set the focus to another element, for example, a link. Example:
<object id="silverlightHostControl">...bla bla bla</object>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
var shc = document.getElementById("silverlightHostControl");
document.getElementById("myLink").focus();
</script>
The shc var is useless, I put just for clarify. Remember: your javascript code must set the focus to another (but focusable) object AFTER the silverlight app object tag was parsed, which means your js code is writen after silverlight app object.
In answer to your question #1, this is happening with our Silverlight apps as well. The only workarounds are 1) restart the browser or 2) switch to compatibiity mode.
It apparently is a bug in ie10.
Thanks for all workarounds solution but this is obviously a bug with Silverlight plugin.
We have raised few tickets directly with Internet explorer development team and they said the issue is from an external problem. It is not a good answer from Microsoft.
Anyway, this time our developers raised ticket through Silverlight development team which still waiting for their response. To get a good response from them, we need to get more people who are facing this issue.
You can vote this issue from Connect website which is Microsoft's official bug reporting platform.
The link to our ticket is: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/789004/ie10-shows-blank-page-upon-refreshing-silverlight-app
Cheers
Moh
Yeah i am also facing same issue with one my application. If i opens help of my application in IE 10 then i have to refresh the page each time to view the contents.
I have two workaround for this issue:
1. Press ALT key once
2. Open IE in compatible mode
When I have the Development mode enabled for my profile, and I open a custom VisualForce page, the code-editing window/frame appears on the bottom of the screen.
Problem: for 7-8 months now, this window does not disappear when I am done with the custom VF page and go on to strandard pages. It's just sitting there, and displays the code for the original VF page. In addition to that, it's keeping the custom VF's URL up in the address bar of the browser, which interferes with other VF pages which take a use of the URL data.
I have submitted this as an issue to SF Support, who had pounded on it for months, and did not resolve.
Have you experienced this problem before, or know how to fix?
I've had this problem before and found the Development Mode toolbar at the bottom of pages particularly annoying. It doesn't work with some of the Firefox plugins that I use. So, I turned it off.
To edit a page without Development Mode turned on, go to Setup > Develop > Pages (or Apex Classes for controllers).
If you'd rather keep Development Mode on you may want to try updating your browser, or try using a different browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome).
You can also use the url parameter
core.apexpages.devmode.url=1
in the address of any VF page to temporarily disable the development Mode toolbar.