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I'm testing a webapp and found logentries that didn't make sense because I did not remember doing the requests. The remarkable thing is that they were all done using this useragent string

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.75 Safari/537.36 Google Favicon

In each case it only requested the main page and the favicon I defined.

Now the big difference with this question is that in my case the requests came from my own laptop (Ubuntu 16.4, Chrome 54). I know for sure it is my laptop because the logentry in the application server showed the full IPv6 address of my laptop. Today I tried the same with my Windows machine and the same happened. In fact: from my Windows machine the EXACT same useragent string was used including "(X11; Linux x86_64)"

The useragent string for the chrome I'm running is therfor completely different from what I see in those special requests.

What is really happening here?

My current suspicion is that Google Chrome itself does a request to bookmarked site to periodically update the stored favicon to shown on the bookmarks list. It seems to be a "special" part of chrome that apparently uses a 'fixed' useragent string indicating an older version of Chrome on Linux.

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This appears to be a "Chrome thing" from as far back as 2010.

It has been reported and marked as a verified bug and also reported as fixed as of version 29 back in 2013 but this doesn't seem to be the actual case as there has also been many reports that Chrome is still sending requests to favicons on it's own without the request being part of the pages content.

This does need to be addressed as the browser taking its 'own actions' without a directive to do so, it's a bug.

Chromium Bug report - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=39402

Different question but I believe this question might shed some light - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003350/why-is-chrome-searching-for-my-favicon-ico-when-i-serve-up-a-file-from-asp-net-m

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