How/why is the Straightdope stealing my bookmark icons

Factual Questions
1

Seems like a question for GQ, its more general interest than a problem with the site.

I use Firefox 2.0.0.3 and I have a few sites book marked in the toolbar bookmarks. Some sites have the little icon of a page with a corner turned down, the default it looks like and others have their own special icon, like the red and white envelope for Gmail.

So the SD is up there and suddenly it steals the red and white envelope from Gmail. This sort of thing annoys me, so I delete the book mark and make another, then suddenly it steals the red and white “b” from Bebo.com

How come it does this?

2

Long standing firefox / mozilla bug that I’ve concluded they are never going to fix. A bookmark for a site, like this one, that does not have a favicon winds up with the favicon for some other random site you’ve visited. There’s an add-on, favicon picker, which lets you manually assign favicons to bookmarks.

3

We’ve had other threads about this issue. This phenomenon is not limited to the 'Dope and occurs with other websites that don’t have their own little icon. It’s a Firefox issue.

4

The SDMB doesn’t have its own Favicon, so Firefox steals one from wherever it can. It’s been a problem at least since 1.5.

You may find this thread helpful: Snuffing the Favicons in Firefox Menus?

5

Not for lack of trying on my part. If you know how to assign an icon to a bookmark, you can trythe one I [del]ripped off from Slug[/del] created.

6

I use Favicon Picker 2 to reset the icon.

7

It’s also not limited to FF. I have the same issue with Opera.

8

Here’s another Cecil icon from one of our old “choose a new smiley” contests:
http://home.earthlink.net/~awinkelried/images/smileypoll1/cecil.gif

9

Nice, just installed it, thanks.

10

All your icons are belong to us.

11

I use IE7 (yeah, the nerds will filet me), and I get this too.

12

Use Opera, no problems there with stealing icons.