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.

Joe has released a follow up update to the 1.03 security update release just a couple days ago. For all the 2.x FF users, you should be given the option to download it as of now. Joe just keeps making better!

If you have not installed Firebug, use Firefox (if you aren’t, what are you doing), install it now! Web development without Firebug is just WRONG.

Get Firebug

Related Story: Firebug 1.03

Joe has released 1.03 of Firebug as a result 0-day security exploit that has been discovered. Joe is recommending that everyone install it as soon as possible.

The update has been published to addons.mozilla.org, so you can get it by updating Firebug from the Firefox Add-ons window. Alternatively, you can install the update using the big orange button on the getfirebug.com home page.

Related posts:

Firebug 1.01 – Released
Firebug 1.0 – Official Release

Joe has just released a update to the recent 1.0 release of Firefox Firebug extension.

Changes are:

1. Support escaping the % sign in console.log() calls using %%
2. Support “Find Next” in the CSS tab
3. Fixed problem causing inconsistent breakpoint triggering
4. Deleting a disabled CSS property will work properly
5. Fixed bug that prevented editing of DOM properties with numeric values
6. Inserted warning about incompatibility with Sothink SWF Catcher extension
7. Fixed incompatibility with HTML Validator extension

If you haven’t gotten the update in Firefox yet, go get it now over at Firebug.com

Related post:
Firebug 1.0 Official Release

Great run down of some the tweak in Firefox.

There are a ton and even extensions for this, but lifehacker has a great right up to get you going right in Firefox.

Geek to Live: Top Firefox 2 config tweaks