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Google Reader Favicon Disappearing

I have been having problems with Google Reader’s favicon disappearing from my bookmarks bar lately. And since I use the Smart Bookmarks Bar extension in Firefox, this icon is essential when it comes to knowing which bookmark is which.

Back when I was using Firefox 2, this wasn’t such a big deal. I would just manually edit bookmarks.html and insert a base64-encoded data: URI that contained the favicon image. I did this twice and was quite satisfied with the result.

But now, I have upgraded to the beta of Firefox 3. It is so much better that I just can’t bring myself to use FF2 any longer. And with the upgrade, the bookmarks are now stored in a SQLite database. Sure, I could update the data in this database file, but I didn’t want to be constantly editing favicons just to get the desired result.

A bit of googling turned up a thread on the Google Reader Troubleshooting group covering this exact topic. Following the suggestions in that thread, I bookmarked the following URL, and my favicon now appears every time:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/#

It even seems to work with the https variation of the URL:

https://www.google.com/reader/view/#

The troubleshooting thread lists a few links that should work. Apparently, you can build your own as well. For example, the following URL appears to have a working favicon. It links directly to my “finance” label.

https://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/label/finance#

It’s disappointing that you can’t simply bookmark reader.google.com or www.google.com/reader and get a favicon to show up in Firefox, but until somebody fixes things, this will do.

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