Found a way to remove favicons from bookmarks

[jim0214]

Did a long search on the Vivaldi forum, trying to find a answer on how to NOT display bookmark favicons/site icons and going up with nothing. I tried everything, deleting favicon file, editing it in notepad. None of that worked. Then it hit me and bingo it worked! I can't be the only one that doesn't want carnival side show of different colored icons. Here is how. I'm using Win 7 Pro, my guess is, other versions work in the same way. You need to be Administrator are at that level. Then take this path; Go to folder Users, Users name, AppData, Local, Vivaldi, UserData, Default. Once your there, you'll find the file favicons. Click on it, then click right button on your mouse. In that menu, you should have take ownership. Click on it to take ownership. Now that you own the file. Click on Properties, in the General tab at the bottom click on read only. Next click the Security tab at the top. Click/highlight System, then click edit. There in the lower box Permissions for System in the Deny column click on Write. No longer can anything be written on to the file. Click OK on everything and no more bookmark favicons. Hope this helps people like myself or maybe I am the only one.

[LonM]

@jim0214 I like favicons so I can't imagine why you'd want to hide them, but for anyone else who wants to hide them this looks like a good write up!

Thanks for discovering this method.

[jim0214]

@LonM Lon that's the reason they make chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Not everyone has the same taste.

[Ayespy]

@LonM Heh, heh. My Bookmark Bar is "favicons only." That way they all fit in a single view, no overfflow, and I'm able to interpret each favicon as the name of a bookmark without thinking or reading or translating. The symbol contains the meaning. But that's just me.

[Pesala]

@jim0214 True enough: The Icecream Shop

[Komposten]

@jim0214 said in Found a way to remove favicons from bookmarks:

I can't be the only one that doesn't want carnival side show of different colored icons.

I solved this by adding a CSS filter:

All favicons and panel icons match my theme's accent colour, and the extension icons match the theme's background colour.

[Blackbird]

@Ayespy said in Found a way to remove favicons from bookmarks:

@LonM Heh, heh. My Bookmark Bar is "favicons only." That way they all fit in a single view, no overfflow, and I'm able to interpret each favicon as the name of a bookmark without thinking or reading or translating. The symbol contains the meaning. But that's just me.

And... I'm just the opposite: my Bookmark Bar is 'text only' with no icons but using only 1-to-3-letter abbreviations for all the names. This way I can have over 60 bookmarks in view at one time, carrying symbology meaning something signficant to me.

I began using and refining this technique since years ago in Olde Opera days when I realized that many of my weather-data-related sub-sites were using identical icons which rendered them useless alone for distinguishing specific pages... and using full textual bookmarks limited the number of sites visible simultaneously on the Bar. This same technique (and the meanings of the symbology) I migrated from Olde Opera to Firefox when Opera shifted to Blink and abandoned the bookmarking flexibility, and finally on to Vivaldi when it first appeared (with its promise of Olde-Opera configurability). Because of my long continuity of usage, these abbreviations serve the same purpose to me as icons do to most users, but additionally provide me with customized contextual meaning. Moreover, with Vivaldi (as with Olde Opera), I can swap out different Bookmarks Bars containing wide arrays of specialty bookmarks for different usage foci important to my work.

My point in bringing all this up is simply to affirm the practical importance of designing a browser with multiple choices of how things are done and displayed, since each user has their own set of priorities and desired specializations - just as @Ayespy has one and I have another. Over the years, Jon has fully grasped the significance of flexibly shaping a browser into a useful tool for each user at all levels of detail, first in Olde Opera and now in Vivaldi. For that I continue to be very grateful...

[jim0214]

@Blackbird You bring my point straight home. With Opera 12.18 and all the other versions before that, you had choice. That's where I came from, now using Vivaldi. It's okay, but it's not Opera/Presto. I hung on to the promise made Vivaldi it would be comparable to Opera's in customizing. Now that this browser has had time to mature, I've given that hope up. Anything even close to (as you called it) Olde-Opera is Otter and it's nowhere near ready for prime time. Now sure it ever will be. It crashes all the time and the looks of it are butt ugly! The search engine their using, has forked a few times since it's startup. As slow as development is going, it seems to me, the developer treats it more like a weekend hobby, than a real working project. Enough of my silliness. I started with no favicons in Opera and wanted to do the same with Vivaldi. I found a way to do just that!

[Ayespy]

@jim0214 said in Found a way to remove favicons from bookmarks:

Now that this browser has had time to mature

I feel your pain, but in no way, shape or form has "this browser had time to mature." It took 20 years to build Opera 12, with an engine over which the developers had total control - and which engine rendered both pages and the UI - in an MDI interface.

Vivaldi is being built on an engine that was never designed for customization, using a UI layer that is unrelated to the engine. Choices and flexibility grow almost daily, in spite of the fact that the Vivaldi team is 1/10 the size of the development team Jon had to work with by Opera's 20th year. I would counsel patience. No one disagrees that your wants are reasonable. But everything takes 'way more time than you think.

[jim0214]

@Ayespy I stand corrected! I didn't take into mind the resources Opera had back in the day. They were huge over what Vivaldi has day. Twenty years ago, I jumped ship from Netscape to Opera. That was version 3 point something. Not sure how many know this, but back then you had to pay for Opera. It wasn't free, until they came out with a banner ad based version. The period I was talking about was the Presto engine timeline, 2003/2013. So many features and innovations came out of Opera software. Most are taken for granted today. Mouse gestures, speed dial. tabs, skins create your own UI buttons and on and on. The best to me were the builtin email client, download mgr. and lets not forget debugger dragonfly. All of Opera/Presto source code sat on GitHub site for over a year. Why no one stole it, I'll never know Back to my point. You are correct about Vivaldi. I have to remember it has come a long way in a short time. "I would counsel patience." is the best advise you gave to me and will be remembered. After rereading what I've written here don't take it as trolling That wasn't my intent. As I'm sure you know, Opera had a small, but loyal followers. I guess I still am! Thanks!

[Ayespy]

@jim0214 Yeah. I bought my first version of Opera. Version 5. Paid to get rid of the ads. When it became free with Ver. 8, I was kinda stunned. Of course I was already hooked by then. When they ruined it in 2013 I still hung on, hoping against hope. I was gone the day Vivaldi came out - Jan 27, 2015. The rest is history.