Solo Technology

I’ve been watching this happen since the beta, yet haven’t yet been excited enough about it to actually log it as a bug (or even see if it’s already known). But I am curious to see how many other people have noticed the same thing.

Firefox 3 appears to “lose” track of the favicons associated with my Bookmarks toolbar.

Here’s a screen shot that should help illustrate:

See the red circled shortcut? As you can see by the fly-over text, that shortcut takes me to my Netvibes page. Yet, at the moment, the displayed icon is for WordPress! As the day progresses, that icon will periodically change to whatever the most recently launched page might have been.

But not every time or (as far as I can tell) predictably.

If I click on it to re-launch Netvibes it will then display the proper icon for a while.

Weird huh?

I’ve observed this on four machines. Two running XP (sp2 and sp3), one Vista Ultimate and one Ubuntu 8.04. All four machines are running the same Bookmarks toolbar shortcuts with Netvibes in the first spot.

As I write this, I’ve just realized I really should move the Netvibes shortcut to the other end of the toolbar to see if this is related to that first spot. Or… perhaps it’s actually a Netvibes issue?

Guess I have more observing to do before logging this as a bug with someone.

Anyone else seen something similar?

16 Responses to “Firefox 3 and Messed Up Shortcut Favicons”

1. David Giesberg on July 12th, 2008 1:23 pm
   

   I’ve seen this sort of thing with Firefox and Netvibes before, I suspect it has something to do with how Netvibes embeds content and retrieves favicons for feeds.

2. Chris on July 12th, 2008 1:28 pm
   

   I suspect you’re right.

   I use the netvibes bookmarks module very frequently throughout my day. I can’t help but guess that’s related to this…

3. Rich G. on July 12th, 2008 8:46 pm
   

   I get it and my Google Reader favicon turns into twitter a LOT. It’s the third from the left for me if position makes a difference.

   Just now the reader icon was right. I went to twitter, refreshed, and botched it.

   Go back to google reader - hit refresh and it fixes it.
   I’ve never used netvibes bookmark thingee and rarely go to netvibes any more.

   This is FF3 on mac.

4. Chris on July 12th, 2008 10:04 pm
   

   Thanks Rich. That helps narrow things down.

   Well, not really — but it doesn’t have me looking quite so hard at Netvibes. Must be more of a FF3 thing.

5. Arvind on July 14th, 2008 4:57 am
   

   This happens for me too since FF3 Beta. For me, the icons that change are for Bloglines Beta & Twitter. Twitter gets replaced with Wordpress icon (though I haven’t bookmarked Wordpress or any Wordpress blog) & for Bloglines, I’ve seen it take some random website that I visit! As with Rich, refreshing the browser fixes it.

   May be it’s got to do with the way we both use bookmarks - just icons without the description text? Some sort of mapping discrepancy icon-description-URL Vs icon-URL alone?

6. Chris on July 14th, 2008 9:28 am
   

   Hmm, I often see the WordPress and Twitter icons in the wrong place too. Interesting (or we all just use those sites too much!)

   Good point on the icons without descriptions though. I wonder if that’s how the other commenters do shortcuts as well?

7. Ty Hurd on July 14th, 2008 1:57 pm
   

   I haven’t had any favicon issues, but with the beta version of FF3 I couldn’t view jpg images if I clicked a direct link (i.e: http://www.sample.com/image.jpg). This problem went away when I installed the official release… FF is still better than IE!!!

8. G Johnson on July 20th, 2008 4:17 pm
   

   Yep, I’ve been seeing this with FF3 through current 3.0.1. Affected favicons include a “file:” address; customized favicons that carried over from FF2; google reader; gmail; and more. Visiting the site temporarily corrects the substitution.

9. Neighbors on July 23rd, 2008 8:13 am
   

   I found this post because I googled the swapped favicon problem on my bookmarks toolbar. There doesn’t appear to be any order to it. And there hasn’t been any correction by visiting the site.

10. Steve on July 27th, 2008 5:19 pm
    

    I get this all the time. It’s almost always the same bookmark, http://www.dailycal.org/, which doesn’t have its own favicon but takes on the favicons of other pages that I navigate to, pretty much randomly. I’m too lazy to submit a bug report, but I hope someone does.

11. John on July 28th, 2008 5:10 am
    

    Yep happens with me as well.. With two different websites though : gmail.com and cricinfo.com

12. Daniel Mufson on July 31st, 2008 10:40 am
    

    On a related note: Prior to my Firefox 3.0.1 upgrade, I had three horizontal rows of favicons associated with my bookmarks toolbar. With the upgrade, the 2nd and 3rd rows are lost, and now double arrows appear at the end of the first line, and I have to click on them in order to see the \”lost\” favicons.

    Anyone know how I can get those other two rows back?

13. Mathis on August 3rd, 2008 11:23 am
    

    My Firefox replaces Twitter’s favicon with the one of spreeblick.com - everytime I visit the latter. I’ve no idea why, though.

14. G Johnson on August 4th, 2008 1:10 pm
    

    Bug is being pursued: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411966

15. Chris on August 4th, 2008 9:00 pm
    

    Sweet! Thanks for that link.

16. James on August 26th, 2008 1:59 am
    

    My desktop icons all got moved. I have them where I want them, and the 3.0.1 update aligned them all nice and neat where I CANT FIND ANYTHING because they are all sorted by something I don’t like. These are My icons, Leave Them ALONE!

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