14 DAY TRIAL // Bookmarking our favorite websites in the browser is something that we all do because it makes reloading them much faster at any time.
As a heavy user, I typically bookmark new pages every day, either because I find them very useful and just want to visit them regularly or just because I need to use them as part of the research I do for various articles.
The more pages I bookmark, the more difficult it is to figure out which one is which, despite the fact that I try to use straightforward names for each new item.
However, one of the things that come in handy when searching for a specific website in the bookmarks folder is the favicon, which helps me quickly find a page by simply checking out its logo.
On Softpedia.com, for example, our favicon is the signature S in the logo, so it’s pretty clear to tell when a bookmarked page points you to Softpedia.
One of the bugs that I occasionally come across in Mozilla Firefox, however, concerns these favicons, and by the looks of things, I’m not the only one. Users online have been complaining about favicons no longer loading or incorrectly using the icon of a different website for several Firefox versions, and as it turns out, a similar problem exists in the latest stable version too.
More specifically, here’s what it happens.
Let’s say you have two different pages saved in the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox, namely google.com and softpedia.com. Naturally, each of these two comes with its own favicon, with google.com using the typical G logo, while softpedia.com integrates the small S that I told you about earlier.
There are moments, however, when Firefox incorrectly loads the two favicons, so you end up either with the same favicon for google.com and softpedia.com or with Google’s favicon for Softpedia or the other way around.
Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward way to resolve this problem, and the only workaround isn’t at all very convenient.
Technically, the problem should fix itself by simply loading the broken favicon in Firefox. So if the softpedia.com favicon does not load correctly, just click the bookmark to have the page loaded, and then the favicon should refresh automatically.
Because this doesn’t always work, the second step is to delete and re-add the broken page. This should technically refresh the favicon, and the correct version should now be displayed.
If this doesn’t work either, your only option is to completely delete the favicons cache. Unfortunately, this means Firefox won’t just refresh the favicon of the broken item, but all of them, so you’ll have to reload absolutely all pages in your bookmarks folder to get their favicons.
On a Windows device, the favicon cache can be found at the following location:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profilename\faviocons.sqlite
Needless to say, removing the favicons cache file may not the best way to go for users with a large collection of bookmarks, like me, but on the other hand, it’s pretty much the only workaround that could deal with the aforementioned issue.
At the same time, a wrong favicon isn’t necessarily something that makes Firefox impossible to use, albeit I do admit that at some level, it has a small impact on your experience with the app.
The steps mentioned above work regardless of the Firefox version that you use, including here Nightly builds – which, by the way, you shouldn’t use as your daily browser given it’s an experimental release.