Favicons are a great way to identify websites visually and it is even possible to display only the Favicons in some tabs with the FaviconizeTab add-on for Firefox. Favicons are not only displayed in open tabs and the location bar but also in the Bookmark’s menu. I would like to introduce two ways to add favicons to websites that do not have their own favicon and display the default boring one instead which provides no way to recognize websites by looking at the favicon.
IdentFavicon is an automatic solution that creates identifiable and recognizable favicons from identifiers like IP addresses. This add-on uses the CRC-32 code of the website as the identifier to create unique favicons for every website that does not have one. The benefit of this add-on is that the creation process is automatic. It does have a few shortcomings that will hopefully be addressed by the author of the extension.
The favicons that are generated do not seem to be saved which means that all bookmarks that did not have a favicon in first place will remain without one when browsing the bookmarks’s menu. Even sites that have been opened and bookmarked will not make use of the generated favicon in the bookmarks.
It’s more of a live favicons add-on that only propels the tab bar.
A far more sophisticated tool is the Favicon Picker add-on. This one makes it possible to change any favicon manually. It might mean more work in the beginning because the changes have to be made in the Bookmark’s properties menu but the results are better.
The picked favicon appears everywhere, in the bookmarks and in the tab bar making it easier to identify websites visually no matter where you go in Firefox. As I said earlier it is possible to change favicons, if you have liked the old Google favicon better than the new one you could change it to the old one again.
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Why are you using a program to add favicons?
You can do it all in the head tag (substitute > and < for ^ in real code):
^head profile=”http://www.w3.org/2005/10/profile”^
^link rel=”icon”
type=”image/png”
href=”http://example.com/myicon.png”^
[…]
^/head^
This is portable between browsers and works with any picture file format, not just .ico. You can even use a .gif for an animated favicon; see harveyserv.ath.cx/redx, which uses a pulsing red X.