Safari favicon bot?

This is really weird!

[tangor]

Since the first of the year the following has grabbed nothing but my favicon - 887 times. If this is a bot, its a dang strange one!

Safari5525.27.1 CFNetwork/422.11 Darwin/9.6.0 (i386) (MacBookPro5%2C1)

Anyone seen behavior like this?

Details: it is a single ip, which I can ban. It does not ask for anything else.

Hurt me? No. Just really strange and strange makes me curious!

[keyplyr]

The Search (at top of page) is your friend :)

[google.com...]

[tangor]

Thanks.

Why does it only request favicon.ico and NOTHING else, and 887 times?

[Samizdata]

You will find that this UA may also be used by Safari for "Save As" downloads occasionally.

I use Macs a lot and have never been able to replicate the favicon-fetching behaviour, which may have something to do with bookmark synchronization options. But I see it in my logs as described.

The "CFNetwork" token is also used by the iPhone in some circumstances to fetch images.

Why Apple think the UA should change for such requests is a mystery.

If they provided proper documentation it might not be.

...

[GaryK]

I've always seen this one used for those two purposes: saving as and grabbing the favicon. It's just Apple being weird like usual. That's neither good or bad...it just is. :)