I am not sure but it may be that toolbar icons for sites (in the "Personal Toolbar" or "Link" tool bar imported from IE) are not idenpendently settable, but are dependent upon favicons being cached for that site. The favicons for each site are stored in a file called IconCache.dat if the F2> Cache > Cache website icons on disk is set (as it is by default).

I have also set
Edit > Configuration > Browser Configuration > browser.chrome.favicons
(and turned of all KM related tasks, including the loader, before restarting KM)

Related threads
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?3,97728,97728
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?1,96001,96026#msg-96026
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?1,97509,97518#msg-97518
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?1,106679,106679

Having read the above threads I fear that I will not be able to use meaningful
icons for my favourite sites.

But....

1) Comparing the behaviour of the "Tab bar", "Personal Toolbar" and "Link Toolbar", the behaviour is different. Please compare the three rows (Links Toolbar, Personal Toolbar, Tab Toolbar here below)
All favicons are displayed in the Tab bar, some in the Personal Toolbar and none in the Links Toolbar
Is there no way of getting the Personal Toolbar (or Links T to behave like the Tab bar?
1.1) If I edit the "Personal Bar" and copy the google link from "Search the Web" to "Personal Toolbar Folder" the favicon is displayed in the former but not in the latter.


2) Is there anyway of editing IconCache.dat manually?
I have tried opening it with a text editor or two but to no avail. Is there some software out there that will enable me to edit the file? I have searched to no avail.

3)A couple of the sites are my own. What is the right way to specify a flavicon so that K-Meleon will find it?

4) For famous sites like Flickr, Youtube, and Yahoo are there URLS that I can link to that will display the favicon directly?


Bacground
In these days of cloud computing, a browser is a bit like a multi-software portal, or OS desktop. The links to my favourite sites are like "quick link icons" to the right of my Windows Start button. On the latter I do not bother with words, I just have a row of ten or so icons. In my browser links I have about 15 or twenty often with two letter names such as YT for Youtube, YU for my university, ALC for a dictionary. I select these applications/sites by using meaningful icons. But on K-Meleon they are not meaningful. I know it is the "fault" of the sites in question, but this does not help me, yet.

Tim

http://nihonbunka.com



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2010 08:31AM by timtak.

The Youtube favicon is now displayed (and the videos too!), for both Youtube and YU which is my university (yamaguchi-u.ac.jp) on my Personal Toolbar.

Deleting IconCashe.dat does not make any difference.

And while above I say that the Tab bar is getting all the favicons right,
I am now finding that the Youtube favicon is getting all around the place!
Flickr, now has a Youtube favicon!

Rather than add bloat to K-Meleon itself, I would like to know of a seperate
IconCache.dat editor.

Or, it would be nice to be able to use a text file to set the icons to .bmps
or .ico files and be done with it. I use the same sites over and over again.
I don't mind some set up stress. (I have been attempting to set up KM for
a day so far and am feeling happy about my progress. Or I would be feeling
very happy, if I knew I am going to get there in the end).

Thank you to everyone on these forums.

Tim



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2010 01:15PM by timtak.

once you set chrome.favicons to true, icons in the bookmarks tab will display as in the tab bar. i'm not sure why they aren't showing as in the tabbar..it could possibly be a bug that those bookmarks were bookmarked initially without their favicons, deleting the iconcache.dat should fix it but every one of those bookmarks will need to be revisited to build its favicon.

the loader could also be the culprit since many functions and features are locked until the loader is restarted. the loader keeps km libraries in memory so certain changes can never take affect unless it has been freed from the system.

there's not really a proper way to make km display favicons properly. it's just that when chrome.favicons is set to false some favicons that are not linked directly into the root will not get cached. another issue is that some sites do not actually use a real icon but a png file disguised as an icon(extension changed) but once chrome.favicons is set too true this shouldn't be an issue..so it's more of a question of how to use a favicon per standards in a good code rather than what's best for a specific browser. i think it's best to link rel to the favicon directly in the website root 'favicon.ico' without subfolders or naturally an externally hosted favicon.. a true icon might also be better than a disguised png especially for some older browsers.

displaying the favicons for 'links bar' internet explorer favourites is a much complicated issue. .url types do not use an iconcache file like gecko or webkit but their favicons are called directly -uncompressed- from usually the ie cache 'temporary internet files' or in some rare cases locally saved icons when the url is edited manually to use a local icon. this is impractical since the cache is quite likely to be cleaned periodically and replaced with newer files when it exceeds its quota and additionally it's not possible for non-ie-based browsers to save 'favourites' with their favicons because that'd require that they actually use ie object calls to 'fetch' those icons.. in other words, they will need to use the trident engine methods and not their own and no render developers will ever do that as it will cause bigger problems. so they best they can do to 'support' ie favourites is gave you the ability to save and open existing favourites but not cache their favicons which is also the same issue in firefox's extension 'plainoldfavourites'. however some can preread the url internal favicon path and cache into their own system.. that is if the favourite was originally saved from ie or an ie shell with a favicon but not save as a *.url favourite while caching the icon. the kmleon favourites plugin lacks the preread function so there is room for improvement in this regards.

Thank you again for replying Mr or Ms. disrupted.

> "once you set chrome.favicons to true, icons in the bookmarks tab will display as in the tab bar"

I wonder what the phrase "chrome.favicons" means. Chrome? Google's browser?

But anyway, since the tab bar was more reliable than the "bookmarks tab" (the Personal Toolbar?), perhaps I should not have set chrome.favicons to true at all.

> i'm not sure why they aren't showing as in the tabbar.

Generally the tab bar is showing okay. (But lately the Youtube favicon has been propogating all over the place.).

I will reboot my systems to ensure it is not a loader problem. (I did close loader.exe in the task manager though).

I would really like there to be a way of hard wiring icons to favicons, or any other type of image file.

I don't mind if it means using a text file, or editing the IconCache.dat file.

The sites I use often (Flickr, Youtube, Google, my workplace, my favourite dictionary etc) do not change often. I don't need to be able to drag and drop, or even have a menu to specify icons. If there were a text or dat file that I could change I would be happy for years.

But havhing icons dependent on site favicons, relying on the sites to have things specified directly and correctly, and then having these favicons change on the fly , seems to a recipe for disaster.

There needs to be a way to set icons, Ahmen.

In the meantime are there any hacks?

Perhaps I could set up forwarding pages on my webspace. E.g. create a page that forwards to flickr, with the flickr favicon set up and supplied correctly. I could then bookmark these forwarding pages. Sounds slow.

Tim



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2010 01:51PM by timtak.

Quote
timtak

3)A couple of the sites are my own. What is the right way to specify a flavicon so that K-Meleon will find it?

The following is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

Quote

Most web browsers do not require any HTML to retrieve a favicon that conforms to the de facto file name and type (favicon.ico) located in the web site's root. If no favicon link is detected upon HTML page load completion and no previous site visits are recorded in the browser's history, a favicon.ico is requested automatically

I have tried this and it works. Just put your icon in the root of your website and name it flavicon.ico and KM will find it.

glad favicons are working now. like most browsers, km supports different bookmark systems to make it easier for users to migrate from different browsers..it's rarely that users use more than one system and ie migrators might not be getting the best deal due to favicons issue and naturally km has better support for netscape html type bookmarking which is the default system for gecko-based browsers.

obviously favicons are very important to your surfing so i tink it's better to convert your ie favorites to html bookmarks, which appears to be easy from ie:
http://www.windowsbbs.com/general-internet/72313-converting-favorites-bookmarks.html

once they have been exported, you can use them inside kmeleon by linking the bookmarks path to them (preferences>bookmarks) you can also merge them with existing kmeleon bookmarks using bookmarks importer extension available at
http://kmext.sf.net under bookmarks category

you will naturally lose the advantage of having 2 bookmarks bars when using bookmarks only but this can be fixed with categorsising your bokmarks in the bar under folders for similar or related links..like youtube under one folder and your university links in another folder etc

since you use the loader, you might also like to check the restartplus extension which is particularly handy when using the loader as it makes it easy to set your changes by automatically closing and restarting kmeleon with the loader. on some occasions restart extension has been known to fix completely unrelated toolbar bugs..though this will remain a mystery
restart can be download from kmext.sf.net under enhancements

kmeleon isn't really complicated and doesn't need a newbie version..you didn't change the cookies setting by the way, by default it blocks 3rd party cookies and only accepts from originating sites..this is a security/privacy feature and it shouldn't cause problems unless websites are up to something fishy. for many years it was default cookie setting for all gecko browsers like firefox because it's the better way to handle cookies.. naturally firefox/mozilla changed their defaults after they became affiliated with google and ad profits became part of their funding.

i agree with you that in many cases, people can quickly assume bugs are related to websites rather than kmeleon itself but there's a reason for that..almost 90% of rendering reported bugs are due to website problems in beeing badly coded or not detecting kmeleon properly as a gecko browser. it's not really as quickly blaming someone else as much as checking first it's a website problem rather than kmeleon. if the rendering bug is indeed kmeleon's, it almost certainly is a gecko bug that the devs can't really do fix because the engine is developed by mozilla.. true, that the km trunk is tailored specifically for kmeleon for speed and better resources management but the rendering bits of the engine are not tampered with.. that that does not mean that all rendering bugs are gecko bugs, sometimes it is a kmeleon bug but those are extremely rare
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/bugs/viewbug.php?bugid=1073

hope you enjoy using kmeleon and never hesitate to ask about any issues and since you're a youtube junkie like i am, please check this link that fixes some of youtube visual bugs in their new layout
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?1,106828

Favicons are a known longtime bug unfortunately :-/ Recently I had a week long hard struggle with them too, and now have a very long macro again that I was temped to post as "Jumping Favicons" - because they just seem do the opposite of what they're told, when changing them manually it gets 100x times worse instead of better!

What *often* seems to help is to force-reload a page, perhaps you've tried that already? (Right-click on Reload-Button)

A few notes to my messy macro, not for you Tim, but if anyone from the KM folks may be able to make any sense of it: When I had some domains set to manual favicons, those icons usually only showed in the the other 3 places, but not in tabs bar. Tabs bar still showed their "normal" icons, e.g. youtube. Except from one domain, one actually worked - but which one was pure luck, and the lucky domain changed sometimes! The weirdest thing was: if I force-reloaded *ONE* of the tabs, ALL the other icons in tabs bar changed too! If lucky, each to their own -manually set- favicons, if bad luck to that of their neighbors!! At some point I had the impression that this happens mostly when there was a tab that couldn't be loaded, and showed page load error. Then -whoosh- when force-reloading any one tab ALL favicons of all tabs jumped just une step forward! That really looked funny, LOL! I've meanwhile learned that the "onLoad" function isn't triggered when a tab shows "page load error", perhaps that's somehow related, somehow confusing a counter or such?? But I could never reproduce anything in a reliable constant way.

@Tim:
I hardly dare to mention such an embarassing way, but if you really use only the same set of favicons, the most complicated and bothersome, but 100% reliable way would be to build a skin toolbar with those icons. To put links on those buttons would be a snap with a macro, but putting the button-images together would be hard work for *you* and guess the icons need converting so I'm afraid they may look ugly afterwards To see what I mean, open your skin folder, and look at e.g. bookmarks.bmp as example. In the past there was only the "magic pink" background what made the icons transparent, but looks like today there are more advanced formats working too. I know nothing about those, but there are some experts here who can tell more, from what I read it's a bit tricky. In KM1.6alpha is one of those modern skins included, AuraAlpha.
By the way the icons in a given toolbar must all have the same size, which one is free, just all the same. And they will show only in exactly this size in the skin.

The other (equally NON-perfect) way, would be to use buttons simply with numbers, like in my toolbar for hotlinks. That's in the icons-skins section in this forum.
But in the end all this embarassing struggle and frustration wouldn't be needed at all if only the favicons were not so unreliable in KM :-(



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2010 06:52PM by siria.

Dear Siria and Disrupted

I would not say that my favicon problems are solved.

On disrupted's instructions (I think) I removed the links toolbar and moved them to the personal toolbar (KM's) which shows some favicons. Flickr has a Youtube favicon and Youtube has none but, some of the others are working correctly.

I looked into creating my own icons as Siria suggested but as he or she surmisedl, it seems too difficult for me. I had made icons for my maxthon links (
I recommend software called IcoFX) but for KM I would need to make a row of four backed in magic pink. I can imagine it looking pretty nasty. Thank you for your candid appraisal of KM favicons.

I corrected my homepage to display a favicon.

I hope and believe that the makers of KM will take note of the favicon problem. On this very compelling review of KM, the favicon issue is singled out as the drawback of K-Meleon.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/freeware-forum/internet-webware-and-networking/2121-k-meleon-firefox-comparison-and-history.html

I can live without icons for the time being.

But is there no way of editing IconCache.dat?

Tim

Aside I read distrupted's signature and became a twitter follower of its author.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/11/2010 03:03AM by timtak.

Hi Timtak, I'm a "she" and disrupted is a "he"
As far as I know just about all other regular posters here in the last year are "he"s (and all that responded to your posts). But I wouldn't worry too much about "political correctness", just guess and wait if they clear it up if the guess was wrong :cool:

Try force-reloading, and if it doesn't help, add a bookmark new, that really helps in "most" cases...

In the "modern" skins the background needs not be pink anymore, e.g. in that "AuraAlpha" most backgrounds seem black, but still appear transparent in the skin. Only on ancient win98 some don't show right, which (fortunately) I still use :cool:

Yep that review is very compelling, no wonder since the author is from here...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/11/2010 09:24AM by siria.

Surprisingly, I am mentioned by full name (but incorrectly !) in that review. I would prefer, for those who know me, to not use my name particularly in a searchable context. Not a real big deal, but now you all know, that's what handles are for. Thanks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/16/2010 06:54AM by snuz2.