All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
In the next version of Firefox, Mozilla will remove the favicon from the browser's address bar -- to help you stay safe while browsing.
The favicon (or favourite icon) is the tiny website logo that appears in the address bar, next to a page's name in your bookmarks, on any open tabs. Starting with the latest "Nightly build" of Firefox, the one in the address bar has been killed off. "The favicon can represent a piece of a site's identity," writes Jared Wein, a Firefox software engineer at Mozilla. But he warns that there are some sites that set their favicon to a padlock.
Because other browsers, like Google Chrome, use a padlock to denote that the page is using a secure connection, "this behaviour can trick users into thinking that a site is using a secure connection when on an unsecured connection," says Wein.
From now on, the icon will be automatically set by the browser, depending on the site's security level. Firefox will use almost exactly the same website security indicators as rival Google Chrome.
If the site has an unsecured connection, you'll see a grey globe. If the site has an SSL certificate, you'll see a grey padlock. And for sites using an SSL certificate with Extended Validation you'll spot a green padlock, and the certificate owner's organisation name.
Internet Explorer and Safari are still using favicons in the address bar. Opera has also turned them off by default, but you can turn them on in the advanced configuration.
The humble favicon started life in 1999, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 introduced the itsy bitsy site logos. They were standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium in the HTML 4.01 recommendation that same year, and later in the XHTML 1.0 recommendation in 2000. Most browsers accept icons in .ico, .png, .gif and .jpg file format.
Wein clarifies that "there are no plans to remove favicons from tabs, bookmarks, or Awesomebar suggestions." The address bar icons have been removed from Firefox's current test builds, and the change will be reflected in the public browser come July.
Updated 13:15 25/04/2012: A previous version of this article claimed that Opera still uses favicons in the address bar. Like Firefox and Chrome, they are disabled by default.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
