Tag Archives: Firefox

16Mar 2012

Favicons missing from Firefox

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I’m not sure why, and I don’t appear to be the only person reporting this, but recently my favicons have disappeared from my Firefox installs. Although it’s only affected 2 out of the 3 Firefox installations that I use (one XP and the other Windows 7 – the one unaffected is also Windows 7). In all 3 cases I’m running the latest Firefox installation and my bookmarks are synchronised via Xmarks (ironically I don’t use Firefox’s built in Sync because it doesn’t synchronise the favicons).

The problem is, reloading my bookmarks from the Xmarks server doesn’t resolve the issue. Indeed, if I visit one of the sites the favicon doesn’t update, which it should do. This, to me, suggests a corruption – as, indeed, does the solution. However, why this has suddenly happened to 2 installations is a mystery – an update to Xmarks or Firefox maybe?

Anyway, the solution I’ve found is a pain, but works.

  • Backup your existing bookmarks
  • Create a new profile by running your Firefox installation with a parameter of -profilemanager
  • Restore the previously saved bookmarks. Yes, they still don’t have Favicons
  • Install and activate the Firefox add-in FavIcon Reloader1
  • Modify the settings so that it times out after 900 seconds (15 minutes)
  • Run FavIcon Reloader (you’ll need to have the old style Toolbar and it’s under the Bookmarks menu).
  • This will now update your favicons. If you try and run FavIcon Reloader under your old profile it won’t update anything, which is why we’ve had to create a fresh profile

It’s now done. However, you also have a new profile so you’ll need to set it back up again, synchronise your existing settings, etc. It might be the case that you can export the bookmarks and put back, successfully, into your original profile. However, because of the original issues I wouldn’t trust it – I believe the profile has somehow become corrupt, which is why I’m recommend a new profile (besides it’s good to do it every-so-often and clear out some of the accumulated crud).

  1. yes, I’m aware that this has now been removed. I’ve extracted the plugin code from my own installation and have temporarily made it available via this download link [↩]
31Dec 2011

Why I still don’t like Chrome

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Last year I made an attempt to move from Firefox to Chrome – as much as I love Firefox, Chrome is a lot quicker in use. However, after living with Chrome for a few days, I’ve moved back to Firefox again.

There was always the issue over searching. I love having a little search box in the corner so that I can do a quick Wikipedia or IMDB lookup. The Chrome equivalent is not as convenient.

However, that would never be make-or-break.

I like the fact that Chrome, when synchronising bookmarks, now looks up the favicons and populates them (it doesn’t synchronise them as Xmarks does, though).

No, what finished off Chrome for me is the total lack of control or visibility with synchronising. Chrome has synchronisation of bookmarks, etc, built in. I therefore imported them from Firefox on one PC to allow it to transfer over to my other installations Sadly, after a number of days it had only made a vague attempt to synchronise a few bookmarks and not much else. All Google offer is a line on your profile settings page to show how many it’s synchronising. No control. Nothing else. Why weren’t my bookmarks moving across? I’ll never know. The thing is, on each machine I could have imported them from Firefox. BUT how can I trust Chrome to correctly then keep them in sync with each other after that? Simply put, I can’t.

I also don’t like the fact that Chrome has no way of displaying separators in bookmark lists.

Maybe I’ll try again later next year. Until then, Firefox remains my browser of choice.

19Nov 2010

Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive

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Microsoft, always ready to introduce their own program naming, have introduced the concept of the “Platform Preview” for Internet Explorer 7, which you can download and try.

Basically, it’s IE but without the ability to change the URL or move backwards through pages – they want you to try it out, but without thinking this is anything like the end product. It can installed alongside your current IE version, however.

What it does do, though, is allow you to test “under the hood” changes – particularly around HTML 5, JavaScript enhancements and (snigger) standards improvements.

A Beta version of the full browser was available a while ago, though, but it was soon replaced with further Platform Previews.

They’re very pleased with their Acid3 score of 95% (compared to 100% for Webkit based browsers, although a lot better than IE’s current 20% rating) and their quick (but extremely dodgy) JavaScript benchmark. Time will tell how it pans out…

One thing that IE9 does add is the ability for sites to create their own jump lists in Windows 7. Here’s an excellent article on how to achieve this. Google Chrome already supports jump lists, and it looks like Firefox will have it after 3.7 is released.

29Sep 2010

Xmarks is closing

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For quite a few years now I’ve happily used Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as my de-facto bookmarks synchroniser. However, they’ve now announced that within the next 90 days, Xmarks will be closing down.

It’s mentioned on their blog, but not their site front page (and I probably wouldn’t have realised if I hadn’t seen the news elsewhere). It would appear that their inability to “moneterise” Xmarks has been the problem. They had made steps recently to move Xmarks towards a newer audience, with the display of site ratings both in search results and in the browser toolbar. However, they’ve done this whilst not keeping up-to-date with the sync applications available elsewhere – they’ve recently added tab syncing, but they still lag behind the sync features of many of their competition.

Many of those commenting on the blog have suggested that they try charging $10 a year for the service – many are saying they would and it does seem strange that Xmarks hasn’t tried a subscription service before giving up.

For us end users, it leaves us wondering where to go now. Personally, I’ve now installed Firefox Sync, which is from Mozilla. This will be included by default in the next major Firefox release – it doesn’t have the bells and whistles which I never used, but does synchronise, well, pretty much everything.

30Jun 2010

PC security for the new user

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I’ve always been a believer that new computer users should get themselves a good manual or enrol on a course – just ask the resident family “computer expert” how many times they’ve had to bail out a family member who’s badly infected their PC through not knowing what they were doing – “But it said I’d won an iPod?”.

And forums, often providing a a potential solution to the c0mputer user having problems, can just makes worse. On one such forum, it is often visited by professional and amateurs alike. One of their most striking (and annoying to me) recommendations is for people to ditch commercial anti-virus products for the free equivalents and to generally make the amateur PC user feel worried that their security is at constant risk.

Lets cover that anti-virus recommendation first of all. It’s rubbish. The free equivalents are not as good as the full price equivalents – if you can afford the commercial version, buy it. The free one should be reserved for those poor enough that they can’t afford anything else.

And making them feel paranoid about security means that many talk about turning off cookies and JavaScript, expecting either to be introducing vulnerabilities to their computer. And the result? Well, one user had problems after installing the latest updates to Firefox. In their response they said…

I try very hard to follow advice on this board so far as anti-virus and stuff goes. Norton and McAfee are no-nos. I run SuperAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, Security essentials, CrapCleaner, Spyware Blaster and Sunbelt personal firewall.

So, Norton and McAfee are “no-nos”. Great.

And, then, look at that list of software – yep, they’re running a full security program (Microsoft Security Essentials) along with an additional firewall (Sunbelt Personal Firewall) and 3 additional Antispyware products. Wow. But, hey, they’re all free.

And it took a few replies before anybody suggested that maybe, just maybe, it was this combination of clashing software that might have been causing the Firefox problems (which they promptly rejected, uninstalled Firefox, installed Opera and then complained that didn’t work either).

My recommendation – one, commercial, complete security solution (spyware, anti-virus, firewall). Don’t listen to those who say “Don’t buy Norton, your system will grind to a halt”. Yep, old message – the latest versions are much better at keeping resources low.

In fact, Norton Internet Security 2010 is the package I’d recommend. You can get a 1 PC licence for under £11 and £28 for user on 3 computers – hardly a bank  breaker.

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