How to disable favicons on Firefox Safari Chrome to prevent tracking and redirect

Edwardon

Brave (Chromium)

  1. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser-Beta/Default
  2. Set Favicon into /dev/null
  3. sudo cp -a /dev/null Favicons
  4. Restart Brave browser

Firefox

Mac OSX Big Sur 12.0.1
Firefox 87

  1. Open Firefox
  2. In the address bar type and enter about:config
  3. Search for browser.chrome by using the filter option.
  4. Set browser.chrome.site_icons to false

Safari

Safari version: 14.0.3
Mac OSX Big Sur 12.0.1

  1. Delete all Safari cache under rm -rf ~/Library/Safari/Favicon\ Cache
  2. Restart safari
  3. Put favicons.db into /dev/null
    sudo cp -a /dev/null favicons.db
  4. Restart Safari again, then all favicons should disappear.
  5. Happy surfing!

References

  1. https://www.cs.uic.edu/~polakis/papers/solomos-ndss21.pdf
  2. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/browser-tracking-using-favicons.html
  3. https://www.ghacks.net/2021/01/22/favicons-may-be-used-to-track-users/
  4. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/332020/296876

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash