The MSN Butterfly hijacked one of my icons in Opera Internet Browser

Factual Questions
1

For months I’ve had a special little button in the upper lefthand corner of Opera that I just click and it takes me straight to the SDMB home page. Suddenly a week or two ago I noticed that it had changed into the MSN Butterfly. It still works perfectly, but that icon is just too ugly for me to ignore.

Does anyone know how or why this happened and how I can get rid of it?

Thanks.

2

Before we get rid of the butterfly, I can’t tell you how it hijacked the regular icon. I can tell you that this icon is called a “favicon” and all favicon files are stored in a folder on your hard drive. The name of the favicon file is the name of the website plus the extension “ico.” For instance, the bookmark for the SDMB is boards.straightdope.com/sdmb ; the favicon is boards.straightdope.com.ico . Note that the favicon name stops after the domain (.com, .edu, .net, etc.)

This procedure is much easier to do than explain. Basically, you must find the butterfly icon, delete it, then rename the correct icon with the SDMB name. Read the whole procedure before doing it. I’ve tested the following procedure with Opera 7.54 for Windows with no profiles (all users who log into my machine use the same settings). It didn’t work reliably with icons on the Personal Bar.

  1. Navigate to your “images” folder. Mine is: C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\images .

  2. Find the favicon file: boards.straightdope.com.ico . It’ll look like that butterfly.

  3. Delete that file.

  4. Find the correct favicon for the SDMB. I don’t have that favicon so I don’t know what it looks like. Skip to step 5 for the rest of the process.
    a. If the SDMB icon doesn’t exist, find another icon you’d rather see. Skip to step 6.
    b. Stop here. You’ll have no icon and maybe the icon will return next time you visit the SDMB.

  5. a. Look at the name of the favicon. If you can you see the “.ico” at the end of the name, rename the icon boards.straightdope.com.ico .
    b. If the name ends at “.com”, rename the icon boards.straightdope.com .
    c. Restart Opera for the icon change to take effect.

  6. a. Copy the icon you’d rather see.
    b. Look at the name of the favicon. If you can you see the “.ico” at the end of the name, rename the icon boards.straightdope.com.ico .
    c. If the name ends at “.com”, rename the icon boards.straightdope.com .
    d. Restart Opera for the icon change to take effect.

If you get lost while doing this just reply to this thread so we can work through it.

3

Worked like a charm. Thank you very much.

I’m still curious as to why that damned little bug was there in the first place. I mean, I know nobody ever suspects the butterfly…

4

Your welcome. Maybe one of the Microsoft worms made a cocoon on your SDMB icon and just now emerged…?

5

I have a similar favicon bug with Opera v7.5

The icon shown for Mike Skallas’ blog everythingisnt.com changed to the Salon.com icon.

It’s weird how that little bit of dissonance made it practically “invisible” in my bookmarks. I’d go looking for it and my eye would just keep sliding off the “Salon” link, until I remembered the wacky icon.

The strange thing is, I checked the .ico file and it was correct. Eventually, I just deleted the actual bookmark and added it again, and it appeared with the correct icon.

Weird.