Written by David Kim — Frontend & WordPress Developer. I test favicons for a living so you don't have to. More about me →A client emailed me last week with a screenshot. Their favicon looked crisp in Chrome, fuzzy in Firefox, and was completely missing in Safari. They had tested it in exactly one browser—the one they use—and called it done. I've made the same mistake. Here's the testing workflow I use now for every client project.
No tool beats seeing your favicon on an actual device. BrowserStack's free tier lets you test on real iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. I use it to check: the tab icon, the bookmark icon, the home screen icon when saved. Safari on iOS 17 handles favicons differently from iOS 18—and BrowserStack is the only way I've found to check both without owning the devices.
RealFaviconGenerator's checker scans your URL and tells you exactly which icons are present and which are missing. It parses your HTML for every possible favicon reference—mask-icon, apple-touch-icon, manifest icons—and flags the gaps. I run this before every launch. It catches things like a missing 192×192 icon for the Android manifest that nobody remembers to include.
If you need to generate the complete set of favicon files from a single source image, genfavicon.org does it browser-locally—16×16 through 256×256 PNGs plus a multi-size ICO. No upload, no server. Then run the checker above to verify they all register correctly.
Written by David Kim — Frontend & WordPress Developer. I test favicons for a living so you don't have to. More about me →