How to restore your missing Chrome bookmark favicons in one click
I find this behavior really annoying. Fortunately, there is a quick fix. David Gewirtz/ZDNET
Favicons are the small icons that represent a website. If you actively browse your bookmarks, these favicons can make it much easier to glance through a list of bookmarks and quickly find the one you want.
Chrome has an annoying habit of losing track of saved favorites associated with bookmarks. Sometimes this occurs after a crash, but I also saw it happen by accident. It’s happened to me about every six months, and a quick search finds loads of Redditors and others complaining about the issue. The image above is what I recently woke up to on my main computer.
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The prevailing opinion is that you need to find and delete your Chrome profile and then set up a brand new profile. This is time consuming and annoying. Luckily, there’s a quick hack that seems to offer a quick fix. It’s a bit crude, but the best hacks are, aren’t they?
This time all my bookmarks were generic in all my bookmarks folders. So what have I done? I selected a folder containing a fairly large group of bookmarks (about a hundred in this case) and opened them all in a new window.
Open them all. It’s fun to watch as long as Chrome doesn’t crash. David Gewirtz/ZDNET
This will definitely put a strain on Chrome, but if you don’t open a folder that’s too large, it should work. It’s definitely fun to see all those tabs open again. In doing so, Chrome seems to fetch and reset each bookmark’s favicon. Luckily, repairing one folder seemed to have convinced Chrome to fix them all.
You are baaaack! The last icon is still generic since the site operator never defined a favicon for the site. So it is what it has always been. David Gewirtz/ZDNET
As you can see I got all my symbols back. What’s really cool is that this process seems to restore all Chrome favicons, not just the ones in the folder opened as tabs.
So, a final disclaimer: this is a hack. It has worked more than once on my Chrome but there is no guarantee it will work for everyone. YMMV. That said, it’s an easy fix worth trying for a minute. If it does what you want, hey, you’ve saved yourself a ton of trouble and time. And if not, you’ve wasted a mouse click.
What about you? Has this happened to you? Did this fix work on your computer? What other Chrome oddities have you experienced? Let us know in the comments below.
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