Tim Dupree

I have been working on some favicon.ico files for a couple different sites and I noticed that Firefox 3 has trouble refreshing the favicon image in your bookmarks, despite showing the newly updated favicon on the tab bar.

Firefox 3 now stores bookmark data in a SQlite file named “places.sqlite”.  This makes it harder to go in make manual changes to your bookmarks.  Additionally, Favicon Picker 2 for Firefox doesn’t work with FF3.

This is how I accomplished a manual refresh of the favicon image on my bookmarks toolbar…  To get into the .sqlite file, and manually “refresh” the favicon icon for my bookmark toolbar, I installed the SQlite Manager Add-on for Firefox.

Now After installing the Add-on, I fired it up via “Tools–>SQlite Manager”.  To open up the places db choose “Database->Connect Database”, then locate the “places.sqlite” file (C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\”default profile”\places.sqlite on a windows xp machine) and open it.

Once opened, click on the table named “moz_favicons” listed on the left hand side. This will load the favicon db.  Click the tab “Browse & Search”.  Now either manually search through the results or click on the search button and enter the url of the favicon for the bookmark you wish to refresh (example: http://www.google.com/favicon.ico), into the empty field next to the big aqua colored arrow on the “url” line. The click “OK”.

Once you have located the desired favicon, double click the table entry to edit the row.  Click the red “X” that corresponds to the “data (Blob)” field to delete the old cached favicon.ico file for the bookmark. The click “OK”. You will be prompted asking if you want to perform the operation, click “OK”.

Now close the database by going to “Database->Close Database”. Click “OK” when prompted.  Now close SQlite Manager, and then close Firefox. Upon re-opening Firefox 3 you will see that the bookmark you edited no longer has a favicon.  Visit the bookmark and you will see the updated favicon on the tab.  The new favicon image for the bookmark will show up after restarting Firefox one more time.

That’s a heck of a lot of work to refresh a favicon, but if you have a new favicon and you’re dying to see it show up next to your bookmark on the bookmark toolbar in Firefox 3, then this is how you will have to do it until someone makes a nice Add-on which does it for you.

If you’re on Flickr alot you’re familiar with what a pain it can be to browse through a photo set or stream. There is a great plugin for Firefox called PicLens which hooks into a lot of mainstream websites, such as Flickr, Google, Photobucket, Facebook etc. and makes browsing through lots of photos really easy and much quicker than the usual click and load routine.  It can also handle YouTube videos as well. Video quality isn’t so hot, but its a really nice user experience.  Check it out.