Favicons are those tiny little icons that are displayed in front of every bookmark and tab in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. They can be used to identify a website next to the website title that is also always shown. There are two main reasons why someone would want to remove favicons in the Firefox web browser. The first reason is size. Bookmarks with favicons can take up to 10 times as much space on the computer hard drive than those without. While a difference between 3 Megabytes and 300 Kilobytes does not look like much it can make a difference especially in very large bookmark collections. The second concern is privacy related as new favicons are requested by the web browser from the website itself.
The following article outlines a two-step process to remove existing Firefox favicons and block new ones from being created. It is recommended to backup all files that are mentioned in this article prior to making the necessary changes.
1. Firefox settings
The first step is to change settings in the about:config dialog of the Firefox web browser. Simply enter [about:config] in the Firefox address bar and filter the list for the term [browser.chrome]. Change the following three parameters to the following values:
- browser.chrome.favicons – False
- browser.chrome.image_icons.max_size – 0
- browser.chrome.site_icon – False
This step does not get rid of already existing bookmark favicons.
2. Removing existing favicons
Press [Ctrl Shift B], select Import and Backup from the toolbar and pick Export HTML. This will save a copy of the bookmarks as a html file to the local desktop. Open that html file in the web browser and run the following bookmarklet to remove all Firefox favicons from it.
You can drag and drop the bookmarklet to the favorites or copy and paste it into the Firefox address bar to execute it.
Save the page again by pressing [Ctrl S]. Save it under the same name. Now close the Firefox web browser. We need to remove the old bookmark files from the Firefox profile folder. Here is the location of the Firefox profile folder on various operating systems:
Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/
Mac OS: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
Windows 98 / ME: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
Windows Vista / XP: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
Locate the active Firefox profile. Remember to backup places.sqlite. Now delete places.sqlite and all .json files in the bookmarkbackups subfolder. Restart Firefox. You will notice that all bookmarks are gone. Use [Ctrl Shift B] again to load the library. Select Import and Backup again. This time pick Import HTML and load the previously edited html file.
The bookmarks will be loaded into Firefox. You might need to arrange them again but all favicons should be gone for good.
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3 Responses to “How To Remove Favicons In Firefox Bookmarks”
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Interesting Martin.
What would be more useful to me is an easy method to set icons for folders.
I use addon Smart Bookmarks Bar which conceals bookmark titles in the Personal Bar until you hover the icon, allowing room for more bookmarks, but it doesn’t work for folders in the Personal bar.
I found (somewhere) an explanation which can provide this with some complicated tweaking of chrome.css but it would really be nice to have an extension which would achieve this by right-clicking on the folder.
Note: Addon Favicon Picker 2 supports this by adding a “Browse for icon” function to the Bookmark Properties and the folder functionality has been requested. but not as yet provided.
Maybe you’ve seen this somewhere else?
The bookmarklet to remove favicons looks great for importing bookmarks to portable firefox.