IE7 favicons

March 26, 2007 4:58 PM

How do I make IE7 not use "favicons"?

I hate seeing the damned things in my "favorites" bar.

For Firefox 2: use "about:config" and filter on "icon". Set "browser.chrome.favicons" and "browser.chrome.site_icons" to false.

Now how do I do the same thing for IE7?

posted by Steven C. Den Beste to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

From the looks of it there is no way to disable the favicons, but you could change the icon in the favorites bar for each bookmark.
posted by mattdini at 5:37 PM on March 26, 2007

Best answer: Well, I hate not having them myself, but.

If the browser can't retrieve them, it can't use them.

My first thought: I'm not familiar enough with IE7 -- I took one long shocked look at the mess of a UI and walked away -- but if there's no facility for ad blocking in the browser itself (where I'd add a filter for 'favicon.ico') I'd grab one of the multitude of ad filter/proxy tools like Proxomitron or AdMuncher that are out there and add a filter there, instead, then clear cache.

Option 2: use one of the browser-wrapper apps like Maxthon, which add a lot of 'missing' features, but still use the IE renderer, and do the the same.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:43 PM on March 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

I would write a script to search out the favicon.ico files and delete them. This would involve recursing through the folders under %userprofile%\local settings\temporary internet files\content.ie5, looking for favicon*.ico and killing them. I would then run this as a scheduled task every 5-10 minutes. If you can't find an easier way (I couldn't) I can send you a script that will do this. Email is in the profile.
posted by saraswati at 6:10 PM on March 26, 2007

Response by poster: Mattdini, I've tried that. The problem is that the favicon gets retrieved and used the next time I visit the site.

Stavros, I tried blocking all accesses to .ico files using Proxomitron, but it didn't work. But I may have loused it up. I'll try it again.

Saraswati, I appreciate the thought, but that seems awfully brute force. If I can't find anything more elegant than that, I think I'm just going to have to live with them.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 6:45 PM on March 26, 2007

You could install a filtering device (such as Privoxy) and then filter out all URLs that match /favicon.ico. However, that will not stop them all as they can be named anything if the page contains a <link rel="shortcut icon"> or <link rel="icon"> tag.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:52 PM on March 26, 2007

And, on that note, you can use Proxomotron/Privoxy to also remove such tags, if present.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:53 PM on March 26, 2007

Best answer: Stavros was right about Proxomitron. Here's the relevant line to add to the blocklist:

*/favicon.ico

However, once you've done that, you have to manually delete all the .ico files out of the cache, and then you have to manually change all the favorites which already have loaded favicon.ico files.

What a pain in the ass.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 6:54 PM on March 26, 2007

Response by poster: By the way, the idea of spidering the temporary Internet files directory to get rid of .ico files would not work, because each shortcut contains its own copy of the icon. I tried deleting all the .ico files manually out of the cache and I still had to manually change all the shortcuts which previously had loaded favicon.ico files.

Anyway, now that I've got that Proxomitron rule in place, and have manually deleted all the .ico files out of the cache, and have manually fixed all the shortcuts which previously had favicons, I appear to be OK.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:01 PM on March 26, 2007

Response by poster: ...AND you need to reboot, because Windows also stores copies of those icons in the file system icon cache. Jeeze!
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:16 PM on March 26, 2007

All this to not have to see favicons? Seems a bit much.
posted by delfuego at 7:23 PM on March 26, 2007

That's a much more elegant solution. Thanks stavros I'll remember that.
posted by saraswati at 7:35 PM on March 26, 2007