How to Get Firefox 3 to Pick Up Favicons

Favicons are great for quickly navigating through many open Firefox windows.

Favicons are the tiny logos that appear next to the URL at the top of your Firefox browser and again at the top of every open tab. They help users quickly identify which window or tab contains which site. Not all sites have favicons, but they are steadily becoming more common. There are a variety of reasons that Firefox 3 could have trouble picking up favicons, but the fixes for each are simple.

Instructions

1. Check to make sure that the trouble lies with your browser. Not all sites have favicons, so check a site with a known favicon. For instance, the favicon for the Firefox homepage is a red dragon head (as of March 2010). The favicon for Google is a multicolored "g" (as of March 2010). If these favicons load, the problem is simply that the site you are looking at does not have a favicon.

2. Clear the browser's cache. To do so, select Clear Recent History from the Tools menu. From the first drop-down box select Everything, and from the second box check Cache. This will essentially reset your saved Web data, forcing Firefox to recheck sites for favicons as they load.

3. Upgrade to the latest version of Firefox. The company releases updates on a regular basis. If you are running an older version of the software, you may be having trouble picking up favicons created since your last upgrade.

References

• Electric Toolbox: Clear Favicons
• Firefox Support: How to Clear the Cache

Resources

• Upgrade Firefox