How can the Firefox personal bookmarks toolbar be made to pick up favicons?

January 31, 2005 6:47 PM

Firefox and favicon.ico: Why does the Firefox bookmark toolbar pick up the favicon.ico for some sites but not others? How can I make it pick up the favicon.ico for my site? [+]

Here is a screencap. If you notice the address bar, the icon is picked up, but not on the toolbar. However, MeFi's appears in both spots. Initially, none of the links in the bookmark toolbar pick up the icon, but the first click after they've been added typically picks them up. Why won't it do that for other sites with icons? I've compared the sources of MeFi and others to my own, but can't find something that would make a difference. Please hope me.

posted by sciurus to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

From MeFi source, copyright Matt Haughey, no doubt.

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/ico">
<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/favicon.ico">
posted by McGuillicuddy at 7:49 PM on January 31, 2005

Is there an easy way to give my own icons to sites that don't provide them? Firefox has randomly assigned other sites' icons to my bookmarks for iconless sites and it's annoying the heck out of me.
posted by CunningLinguist at 9:17 PM on January 31, 2005

The MeFi favicon went on a mutiny once on my machine, and started taking over helpless enemy bookmarks. I just deleted them and rebookmarked. It would be nice/geeky to be able to easily swap them on the user end.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 9:29 PM on January 31, 2005

I have the same problem. I actually have two sites hosted on different machines (development and production) with identical favicon links - just like those McGuillicuddy posted above. One suffers from the problem you describe, one doesn't. Both pages are php generated, sat on W2003 boxes running IIS6. I can't work out for the life of me what is wrong with the misbehaving one, so would also appreciate an answer! What server are you using?
posted by handee at 1:33 AM on February 1, 2005

CunningLinguist: Favicon Picker extension.
posted by mookieproof at 2:14 AM on February 1, 2005

mookieproof rocks!
posted by CunningLinguist at 2:54 AM on February 1, 2005

Response by poster: I've got the same code that McGuillicuddy posted as well but it still ain't working. The page is .shtml and the server is a Plesk 7.1.6, probably running Redhat.
posted by sciurus at 4:05 AM on February 1, 2005

It shouldn't matter w/r/t the server you're using, with (I think) the following exception- your server needs to know how to deliver the "image/ico" mimetype properly, which I imagine isn't part of the default config.

I use PNG files, for this, since they're easier to make and manage:

<link rel="icon" href="/graphics/icon.png" TYPE="image/png">
<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/graphics/icon.png">
posted by mkultra at 8:10 AM on February 1, 2005

Response by poster: Oh, I didn't know .png files would work as well. Will it work with any graphical format? I'll give that a shot when I get home.
posted by sciurus at 8:18 AM on February 1, 2005

When I was trying to replace my favicons, I learned after much hair-pulling that Safari won't look for a new favicon automatically once it's already picked one up for a given site, and you have to delete the old one before the new one will appear. Could be a similar situation in Firefox.
posted by obloquy at 6:06 PM on February 1, 2005