Firefox icons changed – now black background

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Hi. On Windows 7 Prof. 64bit ESU patched to March 2020. Yesterday upgraded Firefox from 68.2.0 esr to 68.7.0 esr and now my Firefox desktop icons have a horrible black background (see screen shot background). I went to the Start/Programs/Firefox/properties/change icon (see screen shot foreground) but it makes no difference, even after reboot. Suggestions welcome. Thanks, Alan

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Yes, they changed the icon for files to now have a very dark purple background, presumably to go with the new purple sphere that the fox is wrapped around.

From your screen shot, it seems that you’re changing the icon for the executable (Firefox itself), while the items on your desktop are either HTML files or shortcuts to URLs.

Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have an option in its graphic interface for setting the icons for files. This means that you’re faced with either editing the registry or using a third party software tool, if you really hate the new file icon.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Alan_uk

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Many thanks Anon for the explanation and the link. I think I will go for the registry change as I’m about to change the registry to address the Win 7 ATM vulnerability.

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Hi Alan_uk,

I used Nirsoft’s Icon Extractor to extract the icons from my older Firefox. The icons were copied into a folder. Attached is a ZIP which contains a Firefox Icons folder and the extracted icons. You can do the registry hack to point to the older style Firefox file icon which is the firefox_2.ico in the zipped folder.

Alternatively, you could copy the older firefox.exe from a backup image to another location on your computer, and then configure your Firefox shortcut to look for icons in the older firefox.exe file. This might be much simpler to do.

Best regards,

–GTP

 

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Thanks for the icons and suggestion GTP.  I did attempt the registry hack but my registry did not have the same tree hierarchy so I abandon that as a quick fix.

I went to one of the desktop icons and right clicked and selected Edit with Notepad++. Here’s what I found:

[InternetShortcut]
URL=https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/2000012-neutralize-telemetry-sustain-win-7-8-1-monthly-rollup-model/
IDList=
HotKey=0
IconFile=C:\Users\xxxxxxxx\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\seso3n0v.default-1522661385315\shortcutCache\d_JUvmHafD7devGNS2PNTg==.ico
IconIndex=0

However, further inspection showed the shortcutCache seemed to be full of favicons rather that the application icons. E.g. the d_JUvmHafD7devGNS2PNTg.==.ico is the Ask Woody icon image whereas the desktop shortcut icon is the horrible Firedfox icon.

As was pointed out earlier, changing the desktop URL shortcut icon is not the same as changing the application icon.

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