If you use Safari on your Mac, you may have noticed that there are a few icons in the toolbar that look a little different than the others. These icons are called Favicons, and they are used to represent favorite websites or apps in Safari. Favicons can be disabled in Safari by going to Preferences and clicking on the Security tab. There, you will find a list of items called Favicons. You can select any of them by clicking on it and then selecting Disable. If you want to keep your favorite websites or apps visible in Safari, but don’t want to disable Favicons, you can do this by using an add-on called “Favicon Mask.” This add-on will replace all of the Favicons in Safari with random icons instead.
Mac users who are using Safari 14.0 and higher (available to users who are running the latest version of macOS Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, and higher) will see a new tab management.
RELATED: The Complete Guide to Mastering Tabs in Safari
Similar to other modern browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, the new tab management feature enables Safari to finally collapse the tabs and only show the favicon when you have more than a dozen tabs open at once. You can now see all open tabs without the need to horizontally scroll through the tab bar.
But if you don’t want to rock the boat, you can disable favicons, and get back the previous tab management feature (as you can see in the screenshot below).
To do this, open the “Safari” app, and from the menu bar, go to Safari > Preferences.
Here, go to the “Tabs” section and uncheck the “Show Website Icons in Tabs” option.
And just like that, the favicons will disappear, and the old tab bar will be back.
Regularly use Safari on your Mac along with your iPhone and iPad? Here’s how to seamlessly move tabs between Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
RELATED: How to Move Safari Tabs Between iPhone, iPad, and Mac
