Link Icons: How do they get there?

[Roy Schestowitz]

Sometimes when I save a link to "Favorites", it comes with it's own
special icon - presumably one that's not on my system drive anywhere.

Then, a few days or weeks later, shortcuts like that spontaneously lose
their
special icon. Could I inadvertantly have that particular icon somewhere
and have moved the source?

Can anybody elucidate?

This is the nature of Internet Explorer, which I assume you are using. If
you want the icons to appear permanently, upgrade to Mozilla Firefox.
Firefox also includes icons in its exported bookmarks, all which it holds
in boookmarks.html under the user's profile.

Roy

 

[(PeteCresswell)]

Sometimes when I save a link to "Favorites", it comes with it's own special icon
- presumably one that's not on my system drive anywhere.

Then, a few days or weeks later, shortcuts like that spontaneously lose their
special icon. Could I inadvertantly have that particular icon somewhere and
have moved the source?

Can anybody elucidate?

 

[William Hughes]

Sometimes when I save a link to "Favorites", it comes with it's own special icon
- presumably one that's not on my system drive anywhere.

Then, a few days or weeks later, shortcuts like that spontaneously lose their
special icon. Could I inadvertantly have that particular icon somewhere and
have moved the source?

Can anybody elucidate?

The icon image is probably stored in your cache, and is automatically deleted
after a period of time. Check your browser's settings.

 

[Blinky the Shark]

(PeteCresswell) wrote:

This is the nature of Internet Explorer, which I assume you are using. If

I did not know that about IE. Do you know how long it keeps them?

 

[Roy Schestowitz]

I did not know that about IE. Do you know how long it keeps them?

I first noticed this bug under Internet Explorer 5, around 1999/2000. I am
surprised it hasn't been resolved yet.

The link icons appeared proprely at first, but after an arbitrary amount of
time they vanished. Of course it's impossible to comprehend this behaviour
as it's not Open Source, but maybe there's caching involved. Re-adding the
page/s to favourites revived the icon of the new entry/ies, but not the old
one/s. It all seemed quite stochastic and I found it rather frustrating.
One day I had a nice little collage of icons, which allowed me to rely on
the _visual_, and one week later it's all just tiny "E's" with long strings
of text that don't ring a bell.

Roy

 

[Blinky the Shark]

Blinky the Shark wrote:

I first noticed this bug under Internet Explorer 5, around 1999/2000.
I am surprised it hasn't been resolved yet.

I'm not.

The link icons appeared proprely at first, but after an arbitrary
amount of time they vanished. Of course it's impossible to comprehend
this behaviour as it's not Open Source, but maybe there's caching
involved. Re-adding the page/s to favourites revived the icon of the
new entry/ies, but not the old one/s. It all seemed quite stochastic
and I found it rather frustrating. One day I had a nice little
collage of icons, which allowed me to rely on the _visual_, and one
week later it's all just tiny "E's" with long strings of text that
don't ring a bell.

One of the standard Windows "routine maintenance" tasks seems to be
"clean up (delete) your 'temporary internet files'". Is there any
chance that in doing that every so often, as IE users seem to be
required to do, they're deleted with the other files that have
apparently built up and congealed into some kind of hard mass, blocking
the arteries of the OS or browser?

 

[GuyBrush Treepwood]

Blinky the Shark wrote:

I first noticed this bug under Internet Explorer 5, around 1999/2000. I am
surprised it hasn't been resolved yet.

I'm not.

 

[Andy Dingley]

This is the nature of Internet Explorer, which I assume you are using. If
you want the icons to appear permanently, upgrade to Mozilla Firefox.

Firefox has been known to lose them too.

I suspect that they're refreshed on re-accessing that bookmark. If the
site fails to serve the icon, then the cached copy gets discarded.
There's a site I use a few times a day, a busy site with obvious server
load trouble, and the icon on that practically flashes on and off.

 

[Roy Schestowitz]

Firefox has been known to lose them too.

I suspect that they're refreshed on re-accessing that bookmark. If the
site fails to serve the icon, then the cached copy gets discarded.
There's a site I use a few times a day, a busy site with obvious server
load trouble, and the icon on that practically flashes on and off.

I thought about it a little further today. In principle, as long as you keep
a back-up of the profile's bookmarks.html file, you should never find
yourself losing any icons. Icons are bound to entries in this
Netscape-styled HTML bookmark.

What version of Firefox do you use? What platform? Such differences probably
matter. My bookmarks are being saved on a remote server every night so if
something disastrous happened (e.g. icons disappearing), I could restore it
fully.

Roy

 

[Mark Parnell]

My bookmarks are being saved on a remote server every night so if
something disastrous happened (e.g. icons disappearing), I could restore it
fully.

Icons disappearing is disastrous?