How to have favicon / icon set when bookmarklet dragged to toolbar?

Pistos picture Pistos · Feb 6, 2009 · Viewed 29.4k times · Source

I've made myself a bookmarklet, and it functions just fine, but when added to a toolbar in Opera or Firefox, it just takes on the default bookmark icon for the browser (a globe and a star, respectively). My site has a favicon, and the window, tab and even [site] bookmark uses the favicon I've specified. Just not my bookmarklet.

How can I code my site or bookmarklet so that the bookmarklet gets the favicon, too?

I'm aware of various manual hackery techniques users can use to set the favicon after the fact, but those are undesirable solutions.

Answer

Guss picture Guss · Feb 27, 2009

A bookmarklet uses the javascript:// schema and thus do not have a domain from which a favicon may be loaded.

So, currently there is no way for you to provide a favicon for a bookmarklet. Think about it like this: remember the whole Javascript sandbox thing - where Javascript may not access anything outside the domain of the web page where it is running? Well a bookmarklet that needs to be tied in to whatever domain for the current page you are watching, cannot be also tied in to a favicon on your own web site.

Update: According to Hans Schmucker's answer, there is a possibility to create a bookmarklet that when loaded by the browser into the bookmark menu it will generate an HTML document that has a favicon. The reasoning seems like it may work but I have yet to see something like this in action and my tests have came back negative.