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If you've spent any time stumbling around the net, you've run across a site using an irritating animated favicon—a moving icon that shows up in the address bar, the site's tab, and even the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. (Here’s one at the DHL site.) While there’s no way by default to disable animated icons in Firefox other than completely disabling all favicons, there are a couple of possible ways to block a particularly distracting web page icon.

Blocking for a Single Site

If there’s a single site that is giving you trouble, you can use the Adblock Plus Firefox extension to block the offending favicon. Just open up Blockable items, find the favicon in the list and choose “Block this item” to get rid of it.

Replace Favicons with Favicon Picker

Instead of blocking the icon, you can choose to replace it with the Favicon Picker extension, although this method requires you to bookmark the site before you can replace the icon. Just open up the properties for the bookmark, and you can either pick an image file to use as the icon, or use the default icon with the Blank button.

Once you’ve changed the icon, you can delete the bookmark and the change should stick as long as you have the extension installed.

Blocking (Almost) All Animated Favicons

Since almost all of the animated favicons have the filename “favicon.gif”, we can use a Stylish user script or dig into Firefox’s userChrome.css tweak to hide any image with that file name from appearing as the bookmark or tab icon.

If you are using the Stylish Firefox extension, create a new blank style, and paste in the following code, which will replace animated icons on the bookmarks bar with the default icon and leave the favicon blank on the tab bar.

.bookmark-item[image*="favicon.gif"] .menu-iconic-icon,
.bookmark-item[image*="favicon.gif"] .toolbarbutton-icon
.bookmark-item[image*="favicon.gif"]:not([container]) .menu-iconic-icon,
.bookmark-item[image*="favicon.gif"]:not([container]) .toolbarbutton-icon {
  width: 0 !important; padding-left: 16px !important;
  background: transparent url(chrome://global/skin/icons/folder-item.png)  no-repeat !important;
}
#page-proxy-favicon[src$="favicon.gif"], tab[image$="favicon.gif"] .tab-icon{
  width: 0 !important; padding-left: 16px !important;
}

You should be able to immediately see the favicons disappear by clicking the Preview button. If you are satisfied, click Save and they should be gone.

(Here are some more functional Stylish user scripts that can improve your browsing experience.)

If you don’t want to install the Stylish extension, you can still use this tweak by creating a userChrome.css file in your Firefox profile directory, and paste in the same code from above (make sure Firefox is not running).

Note that this style doesn’t seem to disable the icons if you are using the Awesome bar to search for a bookmark, or in the bookmarks manager. Got any other tips for killing animated icons? Post ‘em up in the comments.

Blogger Marios Tziortzis details how to set up previously mentioned Mozilla Weave—Mozilla's Firefox-syncing tool—on your personal web server. Setting up Weave with your own server means you don't have to rely on Mozilla's servers, and you can keep your private data, which includes passwords, bookmarks, cookies, and browsing history, on your own web space. It's not a terribly difficult process, so if rolling your own Mozilla Weave server appeals to you, it's worth a go. If you don't already have some hosted web space, setting up a personal home web server could do the trick.

If you’re stuck with that crappy Microsoft OS called Windows Vista, you might, by now, be hypnotized by some of its eye-candy features that you might now consider them as good features. Okay, so I’m sarcastic with that note. Surely, if you’re going to nitpick Vista, you might find a thing or two that can be considered good and helpful features. Like its Alt + Tab function.

It eliminates the the window switch guessing game since it gives you a preview of the windows. Previously, in XP (and in Vista Home Basic) all you get are icons that don’t tell too much about which window you’ll be switching to. While I think it’s not that much of an issue with web browsing, some consider this functionality a good addition to their browsing experience. And that’s why this is supposed to be slated to be incorporated as a Firefox feature for 3.1 set for release late this year.

But if you want to experience that functionality now, with Firefox 3, then you might want to check out the Ctrl + Tab add-on which gives you exactly that functionality. Ctrl + Tab acts like the Windows Alt + Tab only you get to cycle through Firefox tabs. Getting a thumbnail preview might indeed be a great addition.

This works with Firefox: 3.0pre – 3.1a1pre.

Download Ctrl + Tab Firefox add-on here.

Firefox with Greasemonkey: The Google Reader for Wider Screens Greasemonkey script uses all the horizontal space available in GReader for better viewing on wide monitors. Install the script to take advantage of a wide browser window and scroll up and down less than you have to. The Google Reader for wider screens user script is a free download for Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Thanks, Andy!

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): The makers of the previously-posted PDF Download extension have released a 2.0 beta that adds some key features, including a full web-to-PDF converter that retains CSS styling, web links, and layout details. The extension has also beefed up its PDF-to-HTML rendering, and works in Firefox 2 & 3, Flock, and other Mozilla-based projects. The developers have made 10,000 beta sign-ups available, with more to come. Hit the link below for more details on what’s new in PDF Download 2.0.

The newest version of Mozilla’s experimental browser-syncing tool, Weave, just hit the net, and it’s seen a few marked improvements since it was first available. Going beyond bookmarks, Weave can match up your Firefox 3 settings, cookies, browsing history, and even tabs between browsers, with experimental support for passwords and form data—in other words, just about everything except extensions, themes, and plug-ins. There's a lot more to come, and it's still a pretty rough around the edges—this is, after all, just version 0.2—but follow along after the jump to see some of what Weave can do, or at least one day will do, to keep your Firefox browsing consistent and convenient.

The first step is heading to Weave’s home page and installing the add-on. Firefox in Windows detected a security certificate problem and made me confirm Mozilla’s worthiness three or four times before I could get in. After installing the add-on and restarting Firefox, you’re prompted with a welcome screen (with a requisite warning about Weave’s experimental nature), and then your first choice:

If you’re setting up the first of your Firefox browsers that you’ll grab and sync settings from, choose the left button. If you’re trying to pull your settings from Mozilla’s cloud for another browser or system, choose the right. If you’re signing up new, you’ll be asked for a username, email address, password, and then a separate “passphrase” that unlocks the encryption on your server-stored data.

Next, you’ll be asked what you want to back up and sync on the computer you’re installing Weave on:

You'll see again that passwords and form data are "experimental" features. I tried to enable both, and while syncing to a new Firefox profile in Vista, Weave failed with a "failed to acquire lock" error—your mileage may vary, of course, but I found success by choosing the non-experimental defaults.

I'll note here that your initial sync is going to take a loooooooooong time—about 6 minutes for an XP machine to pick up the data from a previous sync, and my Vista system went for 10 minutes before I'd decided to move on—though it apparently worked, given that XP grabbed my bookmarks, cookies, and "awesome bar" shortcuts. If everything did go well, you'll see the screen at right, and you can resume your normal browsing.

To keep your browser synced up, Weave puts an icon in your status bar that lets you sign in or out, sync on command, and see your last sync and activity log. You'll also see a little spinning sync wheel in a pop-up window when you close down the browser—which can stick around for a minute or more, depending on the connection and what changes you've made. You'll also get a Weave menu added to your Firefox preferences, with some troubleshooting logs and syncing options, most of which you can access from the status bar.

I tried out Weave on two different profiles each in Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux. If you’re willing to try out Weave, here’s a few problems I encountered that you might also find:

• Linux = no go: At least on my system. Weave just refuses to accept my encryption passphrase, and it looks like it’s a disconnect between a locally-stored file and Mozilla’s servers. Let us know in the comments if you find a fix or work-around.
• Re-installation prompts: On my XP installation, Weave seemed to continually ask me to install an add-on called “Latest Weave” upon starting up Firefox. I agreed three times, until I realized it was misinformed.
• Occasional syncing hang-ups: Even on systems where Weave managed to successfully install, sync attempts at start-up or shutdown would lag or sometimes outright fail.
• Where’s the bookmark trading?: Weave was said to let users trade read-only bookmarks with other registered users, but I didn’t see any send or receive options in any dialogs or settings. Can you find the gateway?

Caveats aside, Weave is looking pretty exciting right now, and if it works fine on your system, it could be a major time-saver and mobility helper.

What’s your impressions of Weave? Got any tips or fixes for your tester or fellow commenters? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Now that you’ve minimized Firefox’s chrome with a few good user styles, it’s time to maximize your surfing area. Just by moving a few small things around you can have all of Firefox’s menu and location bar’s features, but without all the real estate-hogging. Check out a video screencast of how to consolidate Firefox’s chrome after the jump.

Firefox looks like this by default:

After the consolidation, you get this. Notice that Firefox’s top bar takes up a lot less vertical space.

To do this on your copy of Firefox, first, you’ll need to install the Stylish extension and grab a few consolidation user styles, namely, the ones that remove the Edit and Help menus, the Go button and magnifying glass, merge the Stop and Reload buttons, and remove the throbber. Then, you want to reduce the size of your back button, and move the location bar, buttons, and search box to the menu bar, and turn off the Navigation toolbar.

Confused? Here’s a video demonstration of how it’s done:

How do you make Firefox fit your surfing style better? Let us know in the comments.