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?
Possibly Related posts:
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.
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…
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.
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.
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?
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?
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
Yep happens with me as well.. With two different websites though : gmail.com and cricinfo.com
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?
My Firefox replaces Twitter’s favicon with the one of spreeblick.com – everytime I visit the latter. I’ve no idea why, though.
Bug is being pursued: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411966
Sweet! Thanks for that link.
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!
I concur. I actually just did a search to see if other FF3x users are experiencing the same phenomenon and found this discussion.
I thought it might get fixed with the last FF update. Starting to really annoy me. Looking for a fix.
This bug irks me like nothing else, I usually get it when visiting a couple geek sites (probably 90% of the time when I visit http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/ or http://www.linuxtoday.com/), and very occasionally from hitting the front page of Google.
I was hoping Firefox 3.5 would fix the issue, but it doesn’t. Looks like the bug got moved, too, to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487003.
Thanks for the link to the latest incarnation of the bug report. Love the attitudes in there (ugh). Hopefully someday it’ll get fixed. In the meantime, I’ve just given up on having the first icon in my bookmarks toolbar actually represent the site it points at.
I added my details to that bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487003#c18
Here’s hoping it gets renewed attention someday!
This bug happens to ALL of my favicon’d bookmarks, regardless of site and position. I must have an extension that is exasperating the issue.
I have had this problem for a long time including with the latest FF3.5.6. It happens randomly to all my favicons an drives me nuts. I even used the Add-On Favicon Picker 2 to manually set each favicon to an ico file on my hard drive and they still changed! Grrrr.
Johnson Gr8 Link, like it.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100216 Fedora/3.5.8-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.8
favicons seems to be selected at random and displayed to withing one or two bookmarks of where they should appear. The most recently visited link favicon will overdisplay the previously visited link. This occurs even on local development sites hosted on my own machine (two sites, two favicons, 50% chance that the favicon is in the right place if i visit the two sites consecutively).
I appreciate that this is a real bug since it has been about for at least two years, but why is associating the favicon to a bookmark such rocket surgery? Is this a firefox thing? or a theme thing? or something created by the interplay between the two?
peace.
.p.
it still happened in my firefox 3.6 today, some bookmark shortcut icons on bar get messed up…how to repair it without delete it?
drives….me…NUTZ
every time I turn the PC on, every time I visit a site, in bookmarks or on the bkmk toolbar, the favicons change. CON-stantly.
somebody SAVE ME
PLEASE
just as quickly as I wrote here, I found the fix.
This is WONderful.
checks and fixes sites and favicons, and you can “turn off” the extension until you want to check again.
http://www.andyhalford.com/checkplaces/download.html