I did a clean install with Xubuntu 18.04LTS and lost all the favicons for my bookmarks. Any way of getting them back? Thanks.

In the old days, a well-chosen Firefox addon would take care of this. However the new WebExtension API apparently doesn't allow addons to directly manipulate favicons. In saying that, there is an addon called Checkmarks that does this with the new system, but it entails loading every single one of your bookmarks in batches of 5 to "trigger the native mechanism of reloading favicons" - I'm not sure you want to endure that process.

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Thanks hydrurga. This seems like a pretty big inconvenience, as most people have tons of bookmarks and the generic things of course are no help. (I'm surprised there's not more complaints about it.) My Windows 10 computer converted them all (in Firefox). And last night I added a bookmark on my home Xubuntu computer. It put it in the bookmarks with a favicon. Now at my work (Xubuntu) computer (which's Firefox is synced), the favicon on the added bookmark is no longer there.

Do you have the Checkmarks link in case I want to try it?

If you exported the original bookmarks somewhere as an HTML file, that file contains the favicons too, as far as I am aware, so importing that should restore both bookmarks and favicons.

You can find Checkmarks through Firefox add-ons.

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Hmm. I did install the bookmarks from an html file. (I thought everybody had this problem.) I wonder why mine didn't do the favicons. Thanks for the Checkmarks thing. I'm going to hunt around for a complete solution, as I have hundreds of bookmarks, but if I can't find it, I'll do the Checkmarks.

I found the easiest way to maintain firefox the way I like it is to create a separate partition for .mozilla in my home directory and then automount it in fstab. Doing that means your setup remains the same of boots, installs, upgrades and so on. When firefox upgrades to a newer version your bookmarks and most everyting else remains as it was. The only 'problem' it causes for me is the new version tries to use the existing (old) addons which sometimes doesn't work out too well. But when that happens it usually just disables the addon and you can deal with that separately immediately after an upgrade.

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do you create an account with ff to sync it so when you install again, or any other ff you use if you sign in to that account it gives you everything in your original account?

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Did you create the favicons or did you save links while on those pages??

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If you are asking me, I use the firefox account most of the time. On some I don't. It doesn't really matter. It you are using a separate partition if you use the account to sync it will continue - the bookmarks and things don't change because the profile doesn't change.

As to bookmarks specifically, I just bookmark a page when I am on it. But if the favorites is part of the profile they shouldn't change. Only the program changes on an update or reinstallation.

If you weren't asking me then forget I opened my mouth

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Thanks a lot, agillator. The fstab solution is a little sophisticated for me and what I noticed is that the favicons are showing up after I visit each individual site. So it will take a while to get them all up, but I can live with this.

Thanks BW. I don't do anything with ff. I exported the bookmarks to an html file before I did the clean install, then imported them after I did the clean install. And what I just found is that the favicons show up when I visit the sites, so I can live with that. It'll be slow but that's no big deal.

Thanks jefro. I just saved the sites I visited as bookmarks and the favicons showed up automatically.

Now I found the favicons are showing up when I visit the sites, so I'm okay with that (and will end the thread).

Thanks agillator. I do the same thing. I think it'll all work out okay now, though, with them showing up again.

It really isn't hard to set up so you don't have this problem in the future and might be a good learning exercise for you if you wanted to try it. Here are the steps if you want to take a shot at it, your choice:
1. Set up a small partition on your primary drive. Gparted makes this very easy. Run it as root or with sudo, select your primary drive, add an ext4 partition of 1000MB (1GB). Let's assume the new partition is /dev/sda4.
2. Mount the new partition somewhere temporary like /mnt 3. If you use firefox then copy the entire ~/.mozilla directory to /mnt. If you don't use firefox find where your browser's profile information is stored in your home directory and copy that to /mnt.
4. Unmount the partition from /mnt and remount it again as the profile directory. In the case of firefox you would .
In the case of some other browser you would mount it as the directory you discovered.
5. As root add an entry to /etc/fstab. Using your favorite text editor add this line to the end of the file:
Of course use the proper destination directory if not .mozilla.

Now everything should work properly, when you reboot everything will be correct and the new partition will be automatically mounted, and should you update your browser, the OS or do a complete reinstall your browser profile will be untouched and will appear as if nothing had changed. If it doesn't work right you can always unmount the new partition, remove the fstab entry and you will be back where you started. Mounting a partition does not overwrite what is already in the mount point, it just hides it and makes it unavailable. Unmount the partition and the previous contents appear again.

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Thanks agillator. That sounds so cool. (But I'm still wondering if this happens to everybody.) But, for somebody like me, it also sounds scary as can be. I read it and it makes sense but I don't have the courage to try it right now. I bookmarked it (lol) and will see if I can get the guts to try it one of these days. I really appreciate you taking the time to lay it all out there like that for me.