How to remove the default CRA react favicon?

Your favicon is in project_root > public > favicon.ico.

|
`--- public
     |
     `--- favicon.ico

Removing it is hard as browser generally uses a cached favicon if it doesn't find anything.

I'd urge you to change it. Just replace the favicon.ico file with an image of your choice. You can even rename a png to favicon.ico and use it. Make sure you do a hard refresh. You have to burst cache to see that change.

If you want to go all in on this, generate a favicon using https://www.favicon-generator.org/

Try this:-

Change <link rel="shortcut icon" href="%PUBLIC_URL%/favicon.ico" /> to

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/a.png" /> which should be not present by the way or try deleting the favicon 

You can change it from the public directory with your own favicon and but you'll see while developemnt but when you run

npm run build

you won't see it in the index.html link tag you'll only see it on the development .