How in the Tech

Disable and Remove Favicons in Firefox Bookmarks

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 27, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

Favicons are those itsy-bitsy icons that appear in your browser’s URL or address bar, browser tab, and bookmarks list. The premise for the icons is to be used to quickly identify or distinguish websites from one another, visually. The idea sounds solid but in my experience it’s rarely as pleasant and painless. Typically, in Firefox at least, the favicons associated with each bookmark in your list can be mis-linked – that is, a favicon for Google can appear next to Yahoo. Obviously this very much defeats the main rationale behind favicons! While there may be a technical reason why this is happening, and an equally technical fix, I’m going to suggest going in a different direction. Let’s just disable the favicon from appearing in your bookmark list. Not only will this prevent the incorrect association, it will also greatly reduce the size of your bookmarks file which, in turn, results in a faster response from your bookmark lists.

1. First let’s clean up our existing bookmarks by removing the existing favicons already embedded. Within Firefox launch the Organize Bookmarks… dialog with the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+B.
2. Click the Import and Backup toolbar button and choose Export HTML. Save the file somewhere handy then open it in Firefox.



3. Execute this javascript bookmarklet on your now displayed Firefox bookmarks html file. The easiest way is to copy and paste the link in the addressbar of your browser that has the html file already loaded. Make sense? This is the only complicated part.
4. Save the new bookmarks file created from the executed bookmarklet above.
5. Locate your Firefox user profile. In Vista this is under %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxx.default\ and XP at C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxx.default\. Backup and then delete the file places.sqlite. Additionally, you will see a folder with the name bookmarkbackups; delete all the .json files in this subfolder.
6. Restart Firefox. You’re bookmarks are now completely gone – good thing we took that export from step 2. Reuse the Import and Backup and instead choose Import HTML and point it to your saved bookmarks file from step 4. Your bookmarks should now reppear in Firefox sans the favicon.



7. Lastly, to prevent favicons from being attached to newly added bookmarks we need to disable this functionality within Firefox. In the Firefox addressbar type about:config.



8. Now in the Filter box type browser.chrome. Change the 3 bolded parameters to match what I have below.



9. This prevents the favicons from appearing.