Clear Firefox's cache to clear favicons

Posted December 12th, 2008 in Applications (Updated November 4th, 2009)

Firefox caches favicons even if it doesn't find one for a website. Often when I create a new website I don't create a favicon until after I've set the template up but Firefox continues to show the blank default favicon. This post looks at how to clear the cache, which forces Firefox to download a fresh copy of the favicon (as well as all other image files etc for all sites).

Please note this post has been written with Firefox 3 in mind. It may not work in the same way for older versions of Firefox or versions which will be released in the future.

The first screenshot below shows the problem: a blank favicon next to the url:

The second screenshot below shows an actual favicon in the address area, from this blog:

In order to purge the cache to remove the invalid favicon entries, use the Ctrl+Shift+Delete Firefox shortcut key combination, or selet "Tools" from the main menu and then "Clear Private Data". The shortcut combination and menu may vary slightly from platform to platform (these are taken from the Windows version).

This will bring up the following dialog window:

Because we only want to clear the cache you can uncheck all the other boxes, unless you specifically want to delete other data as well. With only the cache checked:

Now click the "Clear Private Data Now" button. The dialogue will do its thing and then close. If you refresh the page it should grab a new copy of the favicon off the web server and you should now be seeing the correct favicon for the website.

Note... I wrote this a few days before the post date and have since discovered that this method isn't foolproof. The above was all done on Windows Vista and I tested by not having a favicon, then having one, and changing it several times. Clearing the cache showed the new favicon each time. The next day I was using Firefox on Windows XP and had DNS configured incorrectly for a website so it showed no favicon. After correcting the DNS and loading the page again, the favicon still didn't render and clearing the cache didn't make it show again. However it did show again the next day. So I guess in some instances the advice offered here works and in others it doesn't.

Uppate November 4th 2009: Thanks to Brady Tucker for sending me this link: http://www.pcmech.com/article/clearing-all-favicons-from-firefox-3-cache-how-to/

That post shows a few more foolproof ways to purge favicons from the Firefox cache, the most effective and least disruptive of which is to manually empty moz_favicons table from places.sqlite. This is not the easiest solution, but if you read through the comments on that page there are some other ideas and plug-ins available which are simpler.