I upgraded to Firefox 3 on my Mac the other day. I was spewin at the default Mac theme still not displaying favicons in the bookmarks toolbar *scoff*. I wasn’t at all surprised; I had this problem with Firefox 2 but a workaround was to install the “Mac Favicon” theme. But then I googled for it and was doubly spewin at its discontinuation! “Why do you need favicons?”, I hear you ask. Well my Firefox toolbar normally looks like this (on Windows):

I use favicon-only links for my VERY frequently used sites. I can tell them all apart using only the favicon, so they are all called “” - our good old friend the empty string (one of the many advantages of storing bookmarks in a single HTML file and not as .url files on the hard drive as IE does, is that you can name them “”).

Quite rudely, the default Mac theme still gives toolbar favicons the cold shoulder. With no modification my toolbar looks like this (that embossed circle is a link on hover). As you can see, this is quite useful.

Then salvation came in the form of the Stylish addon, which is normally used for applying custom CSS styles to web pages. An article on userstyles.org shed some light on how to use Stylish to tweak Firefox’s userChrome.css file “on the fly” without having to dig around in the Firefox profile, an activity which is both time consuming and just plain dangerous.

With the style installed, my toolbar was useful again. I still have a problem with the “hover” decorations. They’re too thin and look kinda stupid. But this is just a nitpick, really and I’m already used to it. I also added some other tweaks which fixed the spacing and increased font size and toolbar height.

/* change space around bookmark toolbar icons */
#personal-bookmarks toolbarbutton {
margin-left: -2px !important;
margin-right: -2px !important;
}

/* change bookmark toolbar label font */
#personal-bookmarks .toolbarbutton-text,
#personal-bookmarks .toolbarbutton-text-shadow {
font-size: 9pt !important;
}

/* change toolbar height */
#personal-bookmarks { height:22px }

Before I go, I really should slot in a plug for the Foxmarks addon, which in my experience provides flawless and transparent bookmark sync across multiple installations of Firefox (regardless of platform). It’s that one must-have addon I install before all others. You also get a spiffy web interface for your bookmarks.

UPDATE (7/7/08): Added line in CSS block to change toolbar shadow font.