Site icon missing from browser bookmarks?
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Is there any reason why my site’s icon no longer appears in Firefox bookmarks as it used to? I have done all of the usual checks:
- In ‘Site Identity’, the icon is uploaded and is of the proper size
- In my Gravatar account, the same icon is verified and attached to my site here
- The site icon does appear in the browser’s navigation bar if someone lands on my site.
- I have flushed my Windows DNS cache (twice)
- I have cleared my Firefox history
- I have deleted and then re-bookmarked various posts and pages after doing the flushes and clears
- I am running the latest version of Firefox.
- Bookmarks of my site pages do generate properly in my alternate browser, Opera, which is Chromium-based. I refuse to use Chrome which is why I don’t use Edge.
But if a page or post is bookmarked in that same browser (Firefox, in my case), the bookmark icon still keeps being the standard white-on-blue WordPress “W”, rather than my site’s icon.
Firefox help says that it appears to be a hosting (WP)-end issue rather than a browser issue. Typical circular firing squad, lol.
Anyone have any ideas? Or, if you are using Firefox at the moment, would you please go to my site, bookmark it as a test, and tell me whether the resulting bookmark icon is mine or is just the W?
If the site icons don’t work anymore in Firefox bookmarks (although they used to, until a few days ago) I wonder if there is something on WP’s end that no longer plays nicely with Firefox in that regard?
Many thanks for any ideas or help!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hello Cybis!
I went ahead and checked on all 4 desktop browsers I had access to (Opera, Chrome, Firefox, I even reactivated Edge!)
It shows your icon properly in all 4 browsers, both in the tab, in the bookmarks bar, in the bookmarks folder as well. In some way, it is on your end. It does seem you’ve gone through some thorough cleanup, however I’m curious if you’ve cleared the cache for Firefox? You said you cleared the history and flushed the Windows DNS cache, but you never said you cleared firefox’s cache.
If you go here in your firefox browser: about:preferences#privacy, scroll down and select Clear Data. We’re really only looking for Temporary Cached files and pages, but feel free to clear whatever you like! Now reload, maybe that will fix it!
Let me know! -
Hi tykian, I did clear the data but just as a double-check I just now removed my bookmark, did the Clear Data and Clear Cookies and Clear History again, closed Firefix, relaunched it, went to my homepage manually, bookmarked it, and… still only see the WordPress logo. :-(
I then tried installing a Firefox add-on called Cache Favicons For Bookmarks, to see if that made a difference. The add-on was created because supposed in Firefox 72 (we’re now at 134) there was a change whereby if a website disabled the caching of their favicon, this add-on enabled it to be at least temporarily retrieved. Didn’t seem to apply because FF is now at v. 134 but I figured it was worth a try. Here’s the odd thing: That add-on can “see” both of my site icons (they are different sizes depending on whether it’s for the tab or for the bookmark, so that’s how I know) by name BUT Firefox is only displaying the site icon in the tab! How weird is that??
So there is something going on in the Bookmarks function that is preventing my site icon from being used, and so the default WordPress icon is being displayed there instead. At least on my install (Windows 11 desktop).
Something even weirder: I have 32 other bookmarks in that dropdown toolbar as well as 28 others in the toolbar that runs across the top of the Firefox screen, and every single one of them is displaying the proper icon for that site. So it’s not that the Bookmarks function is not working correctly… it obviously is… and it “sees” my site icon itself….but cannot load it into a Bookmark. Only into a tab.
The good news, though, is that you can see it. Obviously it’s my own site and so it doesn’t matter if my own bookmark icon (I have the homepage, the Index page, and the Sales report page bookmarked so that I can quickly refer to or check them) doesn’t appear, as long as other people can see it….but it’s still annoying because up until a few days ago, it was always there. Hm, maybe a week ago at the outside. But not farther back than that.
Puzzling. Very puzzling.
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Hey Cybis!
Very puzzling indeed. I’m not sure why for that specific website it’s reverting back to a default icon, especially where Firefox typically prefers the favicon first. At least it’s functional for visitors to your website, but I’d still like to attempt a couple of obscure things, to see if we can get it back, I’m sure it’s aggravating.
This next idea is going to seem silly but I’m wondering if we can get the website to forcibly cache the image, by having you go to the direct link of your Favicon, and then bookmark there, BEFORE removing the old bookmark. If your 2nd bookmark comes up with the right image, then feel free to get rid of the old one.
https://cybisarchive.wordpress.com/favicon.ico -
Interesting experiment indeed! So…. I opened a fresh tab, went to your supplied link which is just the tiny favicon in the midst of a solid black page….bookmarked that…. which does have my favicon as the bookmark. But that bookmark is only of the favicon itself, not my actual page, of course. The URL of that bookmark begins with the actual name of the favicon.
I then removed my existing “W” bookmark of my home page…opened another fresh tab … manually went to my home page again… bookmarked THAT…. but that bookmark still is the W rather than my favicon.
So the bookmarked favicon shows up correctly, but the bookmark of my home page (which has that favicon attached to it) does not.
Hmm… just noticed something. I have always used UMatrix and it has never interfered with my site because I have everything greenlighted for that page. But now I notice there are 2 scripts appearing (for my homepage) that I don’t recall seeing there before, and so those are still being blocked. The two scripts are pixel.wp.com and stats.wp.com, so I’m going to allow the first one, delete the W bookmark, and try a fresh bookmark again.
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Nope, no joy. All scripts on my homepage are greenlighted, Firefox data, cookies, cache and history cleared, and DNS cache flushed. A fresh bookmark of my homepage still shows the WordPress favicon rather than mine. It’s as if the WP is overriding mine.
Ah, now here is something interesting: Just checked Ghostery, and on my homepage it shows 3 trackers:
WordPress stats, which is allowed.
Jetpack stats, which is being blocked
Gravatar, which is being “modified”.Going to allow the Gravatar one and see if that is what’s causing the problem. Although I have not touched my Ghostery setting for my site in a few years, doesn’t mean that Gravatar hasn’t done anything differently…
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No difference. As far as I know, the same Site Identity favicon is used for both the browser tab and the bookmark icon, I would assume. Therefore, logically, it should display the same in both places.
As you saw, my homepage has a larger version of that same icon in the header. That’s why the Firefox add-on that I experimented with shows both of them (the small one that should be in the tab and the bookmark, and the larger one that is at the top of each page). So they are both there. The strangest part is that the Firefox add-on does NOT ‘see’ the WP favicon that is clearly there in the bookmark….. and theoretically, it should see it! It should be displaying my two site icons (tab and homepage header) and the WP bookmark favicon as well, but it only sees my two.
Curioser and curioser, as Alice would say!
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Hey Cybis!
Just out of curiosity, would you mind temporarily disabling every single add-on you have installed. Add-ons are an… interesting thing. I’ve seen them have all kinds of effects on the browser, and before I try to replicate all of your add-ons, I’d like to see if the problem exists with a clean, add-on free browser?
It seems unlikely to me that you likely don’t have the same amount of extensions in Opera, and thus maybe one is disrupting normal functionality in Firefox, which isn’t the case in Opera. -
Disabled the three add-ons (UMatrix, Ghostery, and SoundFixer) and removed the bookmark-caching add-on completely. Cleared all Firefox data etc, closed it, deleted existing site bookmark, flushed the DNS cache, re-launched Firefox, manually went to site, bookmarked it. Still WP icon. :-/
And yes, I do have UMatrix and Ghostery in Opera. Don’t have SoundFixer there because I only use Opera for the 3 or 4 sites that don’t work properly, or lose functionality, in Firefox. SoundFixer is only for raising the gain of an embedded video or YouTube if it happens to have an abnormally low native volume even at max. I never use Opera for normal web browsing and so no need for SoundFixer there.
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Now here is something else odd. In Firefox, my four selected search engines are Google (default), DuckDuckGo, StartPage, and Amazon. So if I type a term into the box and click the search icon or into the box itself, it normally shows me only those three non-Google options. However….
If my homepage is the active tab at the time that I do this (and I discovered this purely by accident just now), the search box ALSO displays my site icon TWICE as additional search options! Even if my site’s homepage is the only tab that is open. Hovering over each of these favicons brings up “Add search engine THE CYBIS ARCHIVE” and “Add search engine WordPress.coom” …even though both favicons being displayed in the search box are mine.
As a test, I opened additional tabs from a few of my other bookmarked sites: eBay, the Paint.net forum, and LiveAuctioneers. All sites where one might expect Firefox to see as a site where a user might want to use a sitewide global search, right? But none of those three triggered Firefox to ask whether I want to use them as a search engine. Randomly tried about six more bookmarks, and none of those appeared as a search option either.
So now I am curious whether, if you would go to my homepage in Firefox, type any random word into Firefox’s search field and then click on the dropdown or the field, does Firefox display my site icon The Cybis Archive as a possible search engine? And if so, does it display only one of them, or two?
Many thanks again for taking all this time and trouble! :-)
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Can I get a Staff look at this please?
It is very frustrating that the WordPress icon is apparently overriding my custom site favicon in Bookmarks in Firefox/Windows 11 (please see everything above that I’ve already tried.)
My site icon has worked properly in Firefox bookmarks for literally years, until about 2 weeks or so ago. I set up a new computer, downloaded Firefox, imported all my bookmarks from my previous (Windows 10) computer, and set about re-clicking all of them in order to load those site icons into Firefox’s cache. Every single bookmark icon worked properly except for my site (I keep the homepage, one other page, and one specific post bookmarked) where the only Bookmark icon that loads is the blue WP icon. Tab favicon works fine. Everything is ‘connected’ as far as I can tell but that darn WP icon just will not go away.
Firefox Help says this is a WP issue, because all the other sites’ icons appear correctly in their bookmarks and their tabs, as they should.
Is this a Gravatar issue? However, since Automattic now owns both WordPress and Gravatar, there should not be a conflict there either. My icon is correctly attached to my site (cybisarchive.com) in my Gravatar account, so it should work for the bookmark as well as in the tab.
Suggestions, please! TIA
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Hello @thecybisarchive
I wanted to let you know that I sent an email reply with some additional suggestions. Please feel free to reply to it if the issue persists.
Thanks!
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Yes, I received that and replied to your email. I got an AI-generated response recommending something that I had tried days ago and which did not work, and recommending further that I contact a Happiness Engineer. :-/
I also just replied to you in the Support link, to explain that (as I had written two days ago in the Support link) I already tried deleting favicons.sqlite from Firefox. Every other site’s bookmark repopulated the new generation properly except for my site, which still has the WordPress icon overriding mine in Bookmarks.
Have you tried bookmarking my site in Firefox on your end? And if so, what bookmark icon is applied?
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That every other site applies the correct bookmark icon except for my site, points to a problem on the WordPress end, not on Firefox’s.
As a test, I just went to another WordPress.com blog that I remember the name of from a couple of years ago. This blogger has a custom domain name and also a favicon. I bookmarked his home page and… his favicon shows up in its Firefox bookmark properly. But mine will not.
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THE FIX THAT WORKED:
Deleting only the favicons.sqlite from Firefox did not solve the problem; the other two favicons caches (favicons.sqlite-shm and favicons.sqlite-wal) apparently need to be deleted as well.
Marking as resolved but adding this information in case anyone else is trying to fix a problem of their favicon not displaying properly in Bookmarks even though it displays properly in tabs.
Thanks very much for your help!!
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Hi, @thecybisarchive! I’m glad this fixed the issue for you. :) I’ll close this topic for now but feel free to open a new one in case you still run into trouble.
- The topic ‘Site icon missing from browser bookmarks?’ is closed to new replies.
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