Saturday, 10 January 2009

Favicons

There are some things about my web-browsing experience on which I am not willing to compromise. Favicons are one of these things. Quite uncommon when I first came across them (several years ago) they are now extremely common place, and indeed it is more unusual to find a site without than a site with.

My difficulty has been two fold. First my Firefox (both browser and bookmarks toolbar) suddenly stopped picking up Favicons. I assumed that this must be some incompatibility with some of the (many) add-ons that I have. So I started uninstalling the ones that I never use. No help. I spent around an hour searching the web. No help. I did however see a reference to the about:config page ("Beware, here be dragons" as Firefox will tell you). So I typed about:config into my browser bar and up came the page. I typed 'favicon' into the filter, and, lo, results. First listed browser.chrome.favicons - set to 'False'. Double click to change to 'True' and the Favicons are back! Easy when you know how.

My second Favicon related issue has yet to be solved. Blogger have vanished my custom icons. This blog had one (I never got around to it with my other blog) - and they're gone. I'd thought that maybe the Firefox fix would bring them back, but no. All the suggested solutions on the web of moving the code to just before the </head> tag have been tried and failed. Keeping on searching then.

During all this web browsing I discovered something very interesting. Google have a new Favicon. For some time you would get a different Google Favicon depending on where in the world you were. For example ".com" gave you the 'big G' and ".co.uk" gave you the 'little g'. Now regardless of where you start you get a new (and extremely colourful) Favicon.


The Big G


The Little G


The New G

Some people might say that I've got too much time on my hands!