Firebird Favicons

24 September 2003

I have my own site on my Firebird bookmarks bar. It’s not because I love reading my own words and revelling in them in some sort of perverse self-indulgent way, it’s just that the first two tabs I have open in Firebird are always my site and the admin pages of my site – simply because I used them so much. But I digress.

My site doesn’t have a favicon. I’d like one, but I’ve not got around to finishing one yet. It’s hard to draw an armadillo in 256 pixels. I’m not sure if it’s because of this or in spite of this, but the aforementioned bookmark on my ‘bar keeps taking on other sites’ icons. First off it managed to inherit kottke.org’s green and black ‘K’. A reboot fixed the problem. Currently it’s displaying plasticbag.org’s blue ‘PB’ logo. Reboots don’t help. I feel dirty.

Has anyone else seen this? In the name of science (and I promise this isn’t shameless self-promotion) bookmark my site in Firebird and place it on your bookmark bar. If you see any strange theft of other sites’ favicons, take a screenshot and mail it to me. I’ll compile a gallery. This is some weird bizniz goin’ on.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ spencer: I havn’t seen it on your site (I’ve had it bookmarked forever, in Firebird). But I’ve seen this sort of switching going on. I don’t think it has anything to do with your site.
§ trip: I have seen this happen with only one of my bookmarks. It seems to inherit the sourceforge favicon for some reason. It is definitely happening to other people too:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=186532
§ tomjleeds: Yeah, I get that quite a bit. A certain item on the bookmarks toolbar seems to have permanently inherited the Ebuyer favicon!
§ Ryan Parman: My problem is opposite. Sometimes my bookmarked websites have favicons, but they don’t show up in my bookmarks. It’s weird, I know.
§ Nathan Pitman: I just tried, and I ain’t gettin no Armadillo man.
§ Nathan Pitman: In fact, your site (in my bookmarks toolbar) has now adopted the Mozilla Firebird Help favicon... :/

All in the <head>