I usually use FEBE to make a back up of my firefox profile and I use it to restore it. In this case I forgot to do that before I did a clean install of Kubuntu 12.10 on my new SSD. So I just decided to copy over my profile folder(~/.mozilla/firefox/) from my old Kubuntu 12.10 back up. I used the firefox profile manager to select the copied over profile. Everything worked fine but the search engine icons were missing when I opened the menu. However, when I select a search engine, the icon shows up fine. Since I am doing a dual boot with Win 8, I did a FEBE back up and transported the profile back up to Win 8. In Win 8 the icons work as designed. When I open the search engine drop down menu, it all the icons show as they should. So I did a FEBE back up of the Win 8 profile, and imported it in to a fresh firefox profile in kubuntu. The icons still do not work as designed in Kubuntu. I am lost as to why it works in Win 8 but not Kubuntu when I use the same profile. Since I used a KDE distro, I have to use the firefox-kde-support and kmozzilahelper packages from the blue-shell(Kubuntu developers) Launchpad PPA. To my knowledge nothing changes in the search engine function, but I am throwing it out there as I am not sure.

I have tried copying over the searchplugins folder from windows. I have tried restoring the default search for google. I have even tried to update the favicon manually. None of the above worked.