After many months of phantom favicons floating around on my Firefox bookmarks, I set out to find a solution. Well it turns out to be nothing more than a good ole database corruption.

Since Firefox 3.0 and later uses SQLLite as its bookmarks and browsing history, its corruption/damage can result in this “feature”. However after a little Mozilla research the solution is pretty easy.

Since the history is all stored in the places.sqlite files under your profiles you can clean up the mess. So under Windows the steps are something like this:

1. Make sure Firefox is close and not running!
2. Locate your Firefox profile directory.  (Mozilla explains it very well here.)
3. Delete or rename all files named:
   • places.sqlite
   • places.sqlite-journal
   • places.sqlite.corrupt

This will result in your browsing history being purged, but should clear up the mysterious changing / wrong favicons on your bookmarks now.  Each time you visit a bookmark, the bookmark favicon in the menu should be repopulated with the correct favicon image now.

It was kind of silly to worry about it, but it became very annoying to me personally and I wanted the solution since it was happening on multiple machines now!

At least it was an easy fix.  Of course your mileage may vary and your a deleting files, so be careful.