Why Do My Bookmarklets Lose Their Icons in Firefox?
If you understand the power of bookmarklets, you may have a lot of them in your browser. Bookmarklets, like extensions, add useful functionality to browsers such as Firefox. Bookmarklets can increase productivity and even help you have fun. You may wonder why bookmarklets that you add to Firefox lose their icons. This happens because of the way bookmarklets work. There are, however, things you can do to get Firefox bookmarklet icons to appear in your browser.
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Bookmarklet Uses
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Bookmarklets allow Internet surfers to add useful new functionality to their browsers, A bookmarklet is nothing more than a block of JavaScript code that performs a specific task. A "Show Links" bookmarklet, for example, might capture all links on a page and display them in a pop-up window. A "Search" bookmarklet may send your search query to multiple search engines. You may discover bookmarklets that allow you to perform some Firefox tasks without having to install a Firefox add-on. Instead of installing an add-on that shortens URLs, for example, you can add a bookmarklet that shortens URLs.
Installing Firefox Bookmarklets
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Internet surfers often add bookmarklets to their Firefox Bookmarks toolbars by dragging them there. When you visit a website that has bookmarklets, they appear as links on the webpage. These links may contain text and and icons. If you click one of these links and drag it to your bookmarks toolbar, the bookmarklet will appear there along with any text associated with the bookmarklet. The icon, however, will not show up on the bookmarks toolbar. You will see an empty rectangle or folder instead. You can run the bookmarklet by clicking it.
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Bookmarklet Icons
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Your Firefox browser has icons in your bookmark folder, bookmarks toolbar and even next to the browser's address bar. Web developers have the option to associate icons with their webpages by updating the HTML code that generates the pages. When Firefox retrieves a webpage, it also grabs an icon if one exists. Because bookmarklets do not consist of HTML, bookmarklets cannot retrieve icons from Web servers. When you drag a bookmarklet from a webpage to your toolbar, all you add to Firefox is the bookmarklet's JavaScript code. It's icon does not appear.
Solution
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Icons, as you probably know, can often help you work more productively because you can identify items visually instead of having to read text. After adding bookmarklets to Firefox, you can add icons to them by installing an add-on that allows you to associate icons with bookmarks. A quick search for "Favicon" at Firefox's Add-ons page will return a list of add-ons that can assist you. After installing an add-on, you can choose any icon you like and associate it with a Firefox bookmarklet.
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