Favicons on MS Edge Favourites/Bookmarks toolbar?

[Julian]

I'm trying an experiment on my new PC. Rather than install my usual Google Chrome browser I'm using Edge as my main (only) browser for a while. So far I like it, once I'd worked out how to get rid of all the Google nag popups one of which was particularly persistent and required some Googling (ironic I suppose) to find out how to get rid of it. The only problem I'm having now is with the Favicons on my Favourites toolbar (henceforth just "toolbar").

Chrome failed to pick up the favicon for a few sites but Edge seems to miss a few more so the end result is that quite a few of the entries on my toolbar have Edge's default star icon rather than anything meaningful. This is problematic because I rely on my toolbar quite a lot and run it in icon-only mode so that I can fit as many bookmarks on it as possible. There were a few extensions available for Chrome that allowed a user to set their own favicon but I couldn't find anything similar for Edge in the MS Store.

Any suggestions? If there isn't anything simple such as an extension that I failed to spot then I am prepared to look at much more complicated solutions that might involve hacking html somewhere in the depths of Edge's application data if that were necessary but so far I haven't found anything.

As a longshot, I does anyone know if the presumably soon-to-be-pushed successor to the unfortunate 1809 update has any changes in this area? It has always amazed me that as far as I am aware all the mainstream browsers offer the ability to get a right-click menu for a toolbar item where one can do things like rename it. To me a menu option to browse to and select a specific icon file stored on the user's computer to use as the display icon for that toolbar item would seem such a useful and obvious thing to include. Oh well, just me I suppose.

- Julian

[Julian]

Well, it looks as if I've found a solution. There is an open-source utility called EdgeManage that does what I want...

http://www.edgemanage.emmet-gray.com/index.html

I still wish that MS would make this a built-in capability of Edge but at least I have a solution and the guy publishes his source code for the utility so one would hope it's safe although that does assume that anyone has bother to check it all and confirm the binaries are indeed compiled from the source. In this case I think I'll take the risk.

There's also a thread here where someone ("A. User") did a lot of detective work to discover how to do it manually that might be of interest to some people. I think Microsoft might have rejigged the folder structure a bit because I found the icon files in C:\Users\<MyUserName>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\AC\MicrosoftEdge\User\Default\DataStore\Data\nouser1\120712-0049\Favorites rather than where he/she said they were and presumably there's a favourites database lurking somewhere in that directory structure with pointers to the very cryptic filenames for the favicon files themselves.

Anyway, I now have a choice of 2 ways to fix my issue, the hard way of trying to update and apply "A. User"'s research or the easier way of using EdgeManage. I am always a bit wary of downloads from web sites that I don't know but I'll see how it goes after I've got other stuff done.

- Julian