Idea: Chromium or general-purpose favicon fetcher

[MilesAhead]

I'm running Chromium.  Right now the "fix" for losing favicons in bookmarks is to open all bookmarks in each folder on my bookmarks bar.  It launches a ton of processes.  I haven't found a bookmark validation extension for Chrome/Chromium that refreshes the favicons.

What I'd like is a program that sifts through the bookmarks and refreshes the favicons. People say just use normally and they will eventually refresh.  But before then an update is likely to plunk it back to square one.  So a push-button fix would be handy. It doesn't have to be particularly fast.  Low on resources would be even better.

If anyone knows of an extension that already does this that works in Chromium that would be great too.

For Firefox, CheckPlaces does the job. I made a suggestion for Bookmark Sentry extension to add this feature but no one commented. I assume it's never going to happen.

[MilesAhead]

I hacked together something good enough for my own use. Not really smooth.  But it does the job without 50 chrome.exe processes running.

If I ever dress it up nice I'll upload it to my site.

[MilesAhead]

I called it BookmarkVisit.  You can download from this page:

http://www.favessoft.com/downloads.html

The download includes a readme.  But basic usage is, make the browser that needs a favicon refresh the default.  Export bookmarks to an .html file.  Run bv.exe and select that file.  bv.exe picks up the exe associated with that file from Windows to get the process exe name to use when closing instances.

It just uses Windows to open each bookmark that starts with "http:" and every multiple of 10 it closes all of the browser instances.  It just keeps the number of browser instances to a sane level.  You'll see your browser come up, open tabs, close etc.. repeatedly until all the bookmarks are processed.  When done the Gold Star Icon in the Tray should disappear.

It's probably not suitable for dial-up as the built-in delays are short.  But it should work with tabbed browsers running on broadband. Also your browser should be set to open new links in tabs rather than new windows. It should still work but they'll just be more clutter as multiple windows open and close rather than tabs.

See readme for the gory bits.

edit: I made some modifications.  Still, it's a last resort brute force approach. If you run Firefox I recommend using CheckPlaces AddOn instead.  This utility works pretty smoothly with Chromium 10.x on my machines though.