This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

When creating desktop shortcuts, the icons are not attractive like they were with chrome

  • 2 ŋuɖoɖowo
  • 2 masɔmasɔ sia le wosi
  • 5 views
  • Nuɖoɖo mlɔetɔ Tonnes

more options

I switch off of Chrome to Firefox because after years of having no issue at all Chrome started acting up. Every time I clicked on a desktop shortcut to a website, Chrome would take me to the Chrome launch page instead of the website. Then I had to click on the website from the frequently visited tab. So after a few weeks of trying to solve the issue, I gave up and switched to Firefox. All the shortcuts that I create from firefox to my desktop look terrible. They are all a white square with a tiny version of the website logo in the middle of this white square, Why dont I just get the youtube icon for a youtube icon instead of a tiny youtube icon in a white box?

I switch off of Chrome to Firefox because after years of having no issue at all Chrome started acting up. Every time I clicked on a desktop shortcut to a website, Chrome would take me to the Chrome launch page instead of the website. Then I had to click on the website from the frequently visited tab. So after a few weeks of trying to solve the issue, I gave up and switched to Firefox. All the shortcuts that I create from firefox to my desktop look terrible. They are all a white square with a tiny version of the website logo in the middle of this white square, Why dont I just get the youtube icon for a youtube icon instead of a tiny youtube icon in a white box?

All Replies (2)

more options

Is this any help ......

Using a custom icon Right-click the shortcut icon that you created, and click Properties.

In the Web Document tab, there’s a Change Icon… button. Click that. The result is a Change Icon dialog with a number of icons to select from.

Icons are typically stored in .exe or .dll files. In some versions of Windows, the Change Icon dialog will default to display icons contained within your default browser, which usually contains only the familiar icons for that browser. It appears that Windows 10, at least, will instead display icons from the shell32.dll file contained in Windows itself1. This file contains hundreds of icons to choose from. Just click on the icon you want, and click OK.

Alternately, you can download or create “.ico” image files, and specify them using the Browse… button.

If you want to display the actual site’s icon and it wasn’t used by default, you’ll need to download it.

Getting a site’s custom icon Right-click that image and click Save picture as…. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the file, and save it with the name NAME-OF-SITE_favicon.ico.

You can then specify it as the icon for the shortcut.


Please let us know if this solved your issue or if need further assistance.

more options

Welcome to Firefox. :)

I think this happens because desktop shortcut icons are obtained from a website’s favicon (they used to get the default Firefox icon in previous versions) which usually have smaller sizes (16x16px) than regular Windows desktop icons. That means they are centered according to default Windows behavior, but they can of course be changed individually by choosing their properties, as explained here. Chrome apparently found a way to avoid this by either stretching them or providing them in another way (if they are the ones from the website) or by replacing them by its own default icon liek Firefox used to do.

Some websites may offer larger icons such as 32x32px or even higher, but Firefox tends to limit them to 16x16px for created desktop shortcuts. However there is this bug to use larger icons for desktop shortcuts when provided by the website, but given its age and activity, it has no priority. Frankly I have never really noticed, but don’t use the desktop as a regular place for internet shortcuts and if I do, I would prefer to see smaller ones to let them indicate they are temporary ones and not shortcuts for opening programs like "normal" sized ones usually do.

Does this answer your question?