Computer Parts Greenville | Loading new favicons in Firefox

A problem webmasters have from time to time (as well as most others who work with computers Internet and technology) is the need to change yourfavicons. In the past, creating a favicon took a little bit of work because the image had to be in .ico format, named favicon, and residing on a specific place on the server in order for it to work. Computer Parts Greenville Can help you fix your favicons

Nowadays, with modern computers Internet management has become much easier. After all, many Web applications such as Google Docs and WordPress either come with favicon support standard or have themes or plugins that allow you to upload your favicon in .png or .ico format right from the management interface.

Favicons

Favicons are the little mini icons that show up on the tab of your Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. If you are like most that use computers Internet Explorer is not even close to being as good as Mozilla Firefox, but that’s not the point.

In Internet Explorer, your Favicons show up on the left hand side of the page title shown on each tab. In Mozilla Firefox, favicons behave in a similar manner, except that they actually show up on your bookmark list too.

The problem is that when a favicon for a Web site changes, Firefox does not seem to update it.

What doesn’t work

You can create a bookmark, delete it, create it again, etc. and that will not help solve your computers Internet favicon problem. Don’t listen to people who try to tell you that that is the way to solve the problem: it doesn’t work.

Clearing the cache doesn’t work either. You can manually clear the cache, hold down the <Shift> key when you click the refresh button to force a reload of the page: that doesn’t work either.

Let’s see… you can type about:config in the address bar and turn off favicons. This causes Firefox to stop loading and displaying some favicons, but not others for some reason, but when you re-enable it, you still have the outdated favicon for a Web site.

Here’s a clue

If you go to a Web site that you know for a fact that the favicon has changed (i.e. your Web site), you can right click on the page and choose the “Page Info” option. Click on the “Media” button at the top (2^nd from left) and you will see a list of all the media objects that are on the page. Your favicon will usually be at the top. Guess what? If you have replaced your favicon and Firefox does not update it, the “Page Info” window will show you the URL of your updated favicon. Aha! So it knows that you have a new favicon and it just won’t show it to you. Hmmmm.

Taking action

Don’t listen to the people who want you to install the favicon picker plugin, create a new Firefox profile or delete all your bookmarks. Doing that is a drag and, besides, it may or may not work. Here’s how to do it.

1. Install the SQLite Manager add-on into your Firefox browser. This add-on will let you access any SQLite database that is in your computer. We will be working with the one that works with Mozilla.
2. After Firefox restarts, click on “Tools” from the main menu and then run the SQLite Manager add-on.
3. Click the “Database” option at the top left of the SQLite Manger window and then choose the “Connect Database” option. Type in the following without the quotes: “%APPDATA%MozillaFirefox.” Click the “Open” button.
4. Now, double click the “Profiles” folder and then open the folder that looks similar to “a2378w5i.default.”
5. Scroll down and then double click the file that is named “places.sqlite.”
6. On the vertical “tables” panel on the left, select the table, “moz_favicons” and then right click on it.
7. Click on the option called “Empty Table” from the context menu.
8. Click on the “Yes” button when asked to confirm emptying the table.

WAHOO! You now have cleared out all those nasty favicons that won’t go away!

Wrapping it up

I don’t know why it’s so hard to get the correct favicon to load in Mozilla Firefox. With a little patience with computers Internet activity can be corrected using these steps.