TUAW Tip: Bring favicons to Firefox's bookmarks bar

For a number of reasons, I always keep coming back to settling for (read: compromising on) using Firefox as my main browser. For those who are curious as to why, I offer two reasons to keep things short for now: 1) Many of the Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail that Lifehacker included in their Better Gmail add-on enhance Google's web client beyond my wildest productive dreams, and 2) Blogging add-ons from the likes of Clipmarks and ScribeFire do wonders for my workflow.

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.

View Tags

Source: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3692

Categories

Software Productivity Internet Tools Mods

For a number of reasons, I always keep coming back to settling for (read: compromising on) using Firefox as my main browser. For those who...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

13 Comments

Filter by:

Ahmad

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

April 27 2007 at 3:18 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Aronnax

@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.

----
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.

-----

Regards

April 27 2007 at 12:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jeremy

Thank you so much! I have always wondered why they didn't show up.

April 27 2007 at 12:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ahmad

@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.

April 27 2007 at 12:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

aaron

Camino has favicons on it's tabs...it has for quite a while now.

April 27 2007 at 10:28 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

info

http://www.joacim.net/upload/favicon.jpg

April 27 2007 at 5:19 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

info

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!

April 27 2007 at 5:17 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Gary Turner

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/

April 27 2007 at 5:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

olivier Peyre

try flickr on firefox as well.
made me do the switch.

April 26 2007 at 11:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Steve Shickles

Ditto..

April 26 2007 at 11:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply