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Safari calls URLs from favs when opening new window

M

McMario

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 20, 2011
32
6
Hi there,

I have a strange problem which I do not understand right now:
- my favorites are shown in the menu bar
- in safari settings, I chose to open new windows & tabs with "starting page" (don't know the exact selection, but its not "homepage")
- also, I chose to show favorites on the starting page

In my favorites I have an entry with a llink that e.g. disables my pihole for 2 minutes.

Now everytime I open a new safari window, that link gets called, but opening a new tab doesn't (although it also displays my favorites, as configured in settings).

I turned off fast website search as well as fetching of top results in the background.

Still, no change: Everytime I open a new window, which happens a lot, Safari will call that URL (and I guess others as well) and do things I don't want to happen, like disabling my pihole.

Does anyone experience that behaviour as well?

Thanks
- m
 
Last edited:
frou

frou

macrumors 65816
Mar 14, 2009
1,392
2,002
It probably requests each page to get its "favicon" to display in the grid of favourites.

(In web development terms, it's supposed to be safe to make HTTP "GET" requests like this. If the PiHole software changes its state as a result of a "GET" request coming in then that's kinda dubious design. Only HTTP "POST" requests should do stuff like that)
 
M

McMario

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 20, 2011
32
6
frou said:
It probably requests each page to get its "favicon" to display in the grid of favourites.

(In web development terms, it's supposed to be safe to make HTTP "GET" requests like this. If the PiHole software changes its state as a result of a "GET" request coming in then that's kinda dubious design. Only HTTP "POST" requests should do stuff like that)
Click to expand...

Sounds like a good explanation to me, but there is more strangeness in the behaviour:


The pihole-pause-url works like


which, as one can imagine, disables the pihole for 120s.


I thought favicons should be received using e.g.



So I would expect Safari to "identify" the favicon like



Current Safari (Sonoma) does this differntly I suppose - I do not recall having this problem with earlier versions...
 
frou

frou

macrumors 65816
Mar 14, 2009
1,392
2,002
Yep, that is the old-school favicon mechanism, but it's evolved to be a link in the page's own HTML <head> that points to some image URL.

Obviously your problem could possibly have nothing to do with favicons. That's just my theory.
 
Last edited:
M

McMario

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 20, 2011
32
6
frou said:
Yep, that is the old-school favicon mechanism, but it's evolved to be a link in the page's own HTML <head> that points to some image URL.

Obviously your problem could possibly have nothing to do with favicons. That's just my theory.
Click to expand...

Many thanks!

To further locate the issue, I mispelled the URL of the PiHole-bookmark ("aadmin" instead of "admin"), which results in the following access.log (when opening a new safari-window):

  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:53:55 +0200] "GET /apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "com.apple.WebKit.Networking/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:53:55 +0200] "GET /apple-touch-icon.png HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "com.apple.WebKit.Networking/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:53:55 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "com.apple.WebKit.Networking/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:53:55 +0200] "GET /aadmin/api.php?disable=120&auth=SECRET_KEY HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:53:55 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "Safari/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:53:55 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "Safari/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"

All the lines I do understand (at least I think so), but what is the 4th line? All of them report back a "404" (not found, I recall from my old days), but why is the 4th line with a different user-agent? Its all happening in Safari, and the bookmarks (aka favorites) just have two fields: name & URL. Nothing special in my Safari!

Same with correct URL in the specific favorite bookmark:

  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:50:27 +0200] "GET /apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "com.apple.WebKit.Networking/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:50:27 +0200] "GET /apple-touch-icon.png HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "com.apple.WebKit.Networking/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:50:27 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "com.apple.WebKit.Networking/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:50:27 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "Safari/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"
  • SOURCE_IP PIHOLE_IP - [04/Oct/2023:18:50:27 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 341 "-" "Safari/19616.1.27.211.1 CFNetwork/1474.1 Darwin/23.0.0"

The former line four is not shown probably because there is no error, right? I could change the log-level, but I would expect the same request as above, which is Mozilla, not Safari or else...

Any further ideas? Anywhere I could look?

To me, this looks like Safari is prefetching stuff although it shouldn't because I turned of these two (one) option in settings. Or it is loading the bookmark to search for the icon-tag in the header?

Cheers
- m
 
B

BobMcBob

macrumors member
Aug 31, 2004
64
65
I noticed this too right after I upgraded to Safari 17 on my Mac. Every time I open a new window in Safari, Safari is requesting the URL of my favorites (I'm not referring to the favicon, but the full URL of the favorite itself) for any website in my Favorites where the website doesn't have a favicon file. It has to be on the Favorites bar, not just a bookmark.

This is bad.

I noticed it because I had a favorite where my web server ended up sending me an email if I visited that URL for my own website. Right after I upgraded to Safari 17, I started getting one of these emails at random times. Well, it wasn't random. It was every time I opened a window in Safari. After investigating, and seeing which favorites it visited, I suspected it was for sites that didn't have a favicon. I added a favicon to my server, and Safari stopped visiting it. It's not just my server, of course. I can see it happens for other servers as long as they don't have a favicon.

I reported it to Apple in Feedback Assistant and Safari Feedback. Depending on what your favorite does, and if the server doesn't have a favicon, the effects could be a serious problem for someone.
 
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