Quick Tip: Disable Favicons in Firefox
If you are the type of person that dislikes those little site specific icons, then this tip is for you. Favicons can be disabled completely in Firefox with a simple config change.
Just type about:config into the address bar, and then filter by browser.chrome. You should see something similar to this:
Set the value of these two preferences to false by double-clicking on them.
browser.chrome.favicons
browser.chrome.site_icons
You’ll have to restart Firefox, but the favicons will be gone entirely.
Personally, I love favicons, but this article was a request.
This article was originally written on 06/12/07
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Thanks so much for the tip!
Hi there!
Thanks for this tip – but for some reason it won’t work! Both settings have been disabled but Firefox just ignores this… any idea why?
Thanks in advance!
Martin
Hi-
I was hopeful, but it didn’t work for me either. Is it FF3? …or does this only address the address bar icons and not bookmarks too? (Regarding why I want to disable the favicons: it may be subjective, but I think I see the bookmark text faster without being distracted by the icon and having to process it, too.)
Thanks for looking at this,
Dale
)
(”You have to believe in free will, you have no choice.” I.B. Singer
(aagh… if I’d known my colon/LC o/close parenthesis would be displayed as an emoticon, I wouldn’t have used it. : o )
Hi,
This is a little off topic, but very favicon related! (And I can’t seem to find the answer anywhere.)
Do you know of a way to change/replace the default “sheet of paper with the corner folded over” favicon that Firefox 3 uses when a site does not provide its own favicon? I have been searching and searching for an answer on this and just can’t seem to find anything. I am hoping to drop my own default favicon in place, so that when I go to a site without a favicon, I will see my own little default favicon.
Thanks so much,
Jay
I too was hopeful of this removing the Famicons in my bookmarks drop down – but this trick doesn’t work in 3.0.7. – shame…
I DO have a lot of bookmarks – and every time I go to the bookmark drop down Firefox just beachballs for ten seconds or more while it loads in all the graphics for the Famicons. Not what you’d call a useful feature as far as I’m concerned..it really sucks.
Anyway it still does it even with the above trick of “turning them off” – which doesn’t seem to work in current versions of Firefox…
Hey – I managed to find the solution… Do the two steps turning off the browser.chrome.favicons and browser.chrome.site_icons as mentioned above…
These should stop Firefox remembering any more favicons or displaying new ones in the toolbar..
THEN
Quit firefox – then search for and delete the file called places.sqlite in your firefox prefs
this will delete the favicons that firefox is currently remembering.. Don’t worry – the file is regenerated when firefox is next run..
restart firefox – bingo – no favicons in my bookmarks menu and a no more “making a cup of tea waiting for the favicons to load” any more…
hope this works well for everybody..
Warren..
Similarly related, I have a few RSS feeds and I would love to understand why FF (3.0.13) will randomly load the favicons on the feeds and other days they are entirely missing.
It’s too bad there is no way to only disable animated favicons.
Firefox’s impossible to remove animated icons “feature” has made it necessary for many people such as myself to completely disable favicons. I am starting to miss them, and hope that Mozilla fixes this bug soon.
There is an add-on for this.
“Favicon Picker 3″