Firefox 8, it's that time again

[Tetsuo]

I think on all the recent firefox updates, certainly for 6&7 on my system it has defaulted (no pun intended) to the firefox default theme.

Version 8 has also removed my pinned App Tabs (i.e. Google Translate), by the way.

[DavidR]

Strange it didn't remove any of mine (I have several, stop forum spam, ebay, MyYahoo, IP checking and a local file), just that the interface looked butt ugly in the default theme. Why oh why do they have such an ugly default interface.

[Tetsuo]

Strange it didn't remove any of mine

Uhm, perhaps it was a coincidence (in my case).

Why oh why do they have such an ugly default interface.

c'mon, it's not that ugly!  

[DavidR]

I hope the smiley is an indication you are joking and it is butt ugly, looks like windows 95

[DavidR]

Judge for yourself if it isn't butt ugly when compared to an average/half decent theme

[Tetsuo]

Yeah, actually it sucks   - though I'm still using the default one since some minor issues I had in the past with other themes.
 
However, in my defense I must point out that I use the default minimal view of FF: only address bar and nothing else - yeah it looks exactly like windows 95 now 

[MikeBCda]

About the only change I can see (other than the new ability to untick hardware acceleration) is that a number of my bookmarks have now lost their favicons.  And something I've never seen before, the missing ones have been replaced by tiny dotted image-placeholders.

[DavidR]

You must be using the default theme that uses the dotted square, use any half decent theme and it is likely to have a neater/nicer icon for it. I lost lots of my favicons, but it doesn't look so bad replaced by a nice little heart.

There it a tool to recover bookmark favicons, but for the life of me I can't remember it.

So a little search returns this for IE, http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/06/12/how-to-restore-all-your-ie-bookmark-favicons-at-once/ there is also a faviconize tab firefox addon. I'm in the process of getting them now.

[Gopher John]

CheckPlaces https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/checkplaces/ has the ability to retrieve favicon.ico during it's checks for whether the link target actually exists on the internet.  It can check for duplicate bookmarks, etc.  Set it's options for the job you want it to do.  There are also other extensions may work.

[DavidR]

Yes I have found that and spent the last 20 minutes running it and filtering out the duds in my bookmarks. I abandoned the faviconize tab firefox addon, incomprehensible.

[Gopher John]

The dotted square is the new default icon when a web page doesn't have a favicon.ico  If you have the Stylish extension, there are two options listed http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=11448443#p11448443.

[Nesivos]

Judge for yourself if it isn't butt ugly when compared to an average/half decent theme

This is what my FF8 Persona and Toolbar looks like with the default upgrade

[MikeBCda]

OK, thanks, I've now added (and run) CheckPlaces, and while it didn't seem to have any luck finding missing favicons, it did find that a couple of bookmarks I haven't used in ages are now dead links.

(Edit, forgot to include in this posting) I'm not clear what their definition of "Questionable" links is, of which it found quite a few.  It seems to somehow relate to redirects, so possibly my bookmarks just aren't up to date for those sites.  Fix-all for this tab didn't seem to do anything, but maybe it did the corrections quite quickly so I didn't notice ... I'll try another scan later on to see if I still get them.

[DavidR]

It did a pretty good job of finding/getting mine it did take a fairly long time as I had 1607 bookmarks at the start. It found lots of old dead links. Yes it would be nice if they had some definitions of what the sections meant.

[MikeBCda]

I tried again later and this time all the Questionable ones were gone.  So I guess "Fix all" really did work quite quickly, at least on my broadband.

One setting I changed on the second run was to remove the check for duplicates.  I do use the Bookmarks toolbar and find it quite handy for places I visit frequently, and leave a copy in the main bookmarks menu in case one or the other gets corrupted. And naturally, CheckPlaces insisted on "warning" me about the (deliberate) duplicates.

(Edit) Apologies to those who feel we wandered too far off the main topic with this sub-discussion. I for one am satisfied with the result and done with it.