Filed under: Software, Productivity, Internet Tools, Mods
TUAW Tip: Bring favicons to Firefox's bookmarks bar
Nevertheless, one of the things that's always irked me about the Mac version of Firefox is its lack of favicons in the bookmarks bar right out of the box. Pouring salt on the wound, no amount of research through Firefox's help files, Mozilla's forums or even Firefox's own config file (accessible by typing about:config in the address bar) yielded any kind of explanation or workaround. But thankfully, I finally found a solution, so if you're in this same bucket and you want favicons in your Firefox bookmarks bar, listen up: it's all (apparently) about the theme. I don't know how or what exactly these theme authors are doing, but installing some of the themes available from Mozilla's add-ons site will bring favicons to Firefox's toolbar once you enable the theme and restart the browser. I first tried the Blue Ice theme which worked just fine, but finally settled on Mac Favicon which simply edits the default theme to enable the tiny but handy icons. I'm sure more of the themes at Mozilla's site will do the trick, and I would bet that checking their preview screenshots to see if favicons are indeed visible should save you some time when searching for the right solution.
I would imagine Mozilla turned off favicons by default to make the browser look and feel a little more like Safari, but they could have made our lives easier by simply offering a menu item, possibly under View. Ultimately, an add-on like the ones I've mentioned are a decent enough solution for now, but I recommend you submit this as feedback to the Firefox team if you've been jonesing for favicons as bad as I have.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Wojtek Zlobicki said 9:13PM on 4-26-2007
Thank You !!! The Firefox Favicon issue is the second biggest pet peve of mine on the Mac. I am using the Favicon theme and its great. Its amazing hom much we use those little buggers to recognize the site.
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Roye said 10:27PM on 4-26-2007
Thanks!
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Leonard Nimrod said 11:37PM on 4-26-2007
I use FoxMarks to sync my bookmarks acrosss multiple OSes. I use the bookmarks toolbar with only the FavIcon displayed to save valuable monitor real estate. This has finally allowed me to utilize Firefox on OS X with ease.
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Steve Shickles said 11:36PM on 4-26-2007
Ditto..
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olivier said 11:55PM on 4-26-2007
try flickr on firefox as well.
made me do the switch.
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Gary Turner said 5:11AM on 4-27-2007
You may also like to edit bookmarks with favicons to remove the text description; you can then click only on the favicon to get to your favorite sites plus you get about three times as many bookmarks in your bar. This works in all flavours of Firefox and Camino, too.
Example here http://weblog.garyturner.net/index.php/2006/07/21/camino-tip/
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info said 5:18AM on 4-27-2007
This is one of the most annoying things about Firefox, I've been using the Favicon Theme for a while now even though I would love to use the GrApple (Eos) theme WITH favicons. I'm also using the FaviconizeTabs as you can see on my tabs, I love it!
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info said 5:20AM on 4-27-2007
http://www.joacim.net/upload/favicon.jpg
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aaron said 10:29AM on 4-27-2007
Camino has favicons on it's tabs...it has for quite a while now.
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Ahmad said 12:04PM on 4-27-2007
@7, favicons would look so ugly with that theme. I'm using GrApple Eos Pro and I think it looks a whole lot better without the favicons and gives it a cleaner, slicker look.
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Jeremy said 12:45PM on 4-27-2007
Thank you so much! I have always wondered why they didn't show up.
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Aronnax said 1:08PM on 4-27-2007
@7 and @10
I think is nicer without the favicons, but it is naturally as well possible to add these favicons on my and other themes.
there:
http://www.takebacktheweb.org/CaE.html
is a description how to add "Favicons to the Bookmarks Toolbar" - works for example with my GrApple, Pinstripe from Kevin Gerich and the Mac Firefox default theme.
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Favicons to the Bookmarks Toolbar
works with these modifications in your userChrome.css
.bookmark-item > .toolbarbutton-icon {
padding: 0px 2px 0px 0px !important;
margin: 0px !important;
width: 18px !important;
height: 16px !important;
display: inline !important;
}
.bookmark-item:hover > .toolbarbutton-icon {
background: url("chrome://browser/skin/bookmark-hover-mid.png") repeat-x !important;
}
.bookmark-item:hover:active > .toolbarbutton-icon {
background: url("chrome://browser/skin/bookmark-open-mid.png") repeat-x !important;
}
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item[container]:hover:active > .toolbarbutton-text,
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item[container][open="true"] > .toolbarbutton-text,
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item[container]:hover:active > .toolbarbutton-icon,
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item[container][open="true"] > .toolbarbutton-icon {
background: url("chrome://browser/skin/bookmark-open-mid.png") repeat-x !important;
}
About the userChrome.css:
This file sets the display rules for various elements in the Firefox user interface and is located in the sub-folder called chrome in your profile folder. The file does not exist by default, so you need to create it before you can start adding your preferences. There's actually an example file that exists by default, called userChrome-example.css. Basically, you can just rename that file by removing the -example part.
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Regards
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Ahmad said 3:18PM on 4-27-2007
wow, you're a real helpful guy Aronnax. I don't know if you remember, but I'm the guy who emailed you about switching some of the buttons for the latest version of GrApple (specifically the New Tab button)
Thanks
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