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 zmozzilahelper 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 if

It is probable that the icons in questions were not included in the profile backup that is being made.
It could also be possible that the icon lookup is running into KDE code which expects that icons are placed in the appropriate locations per the XDG specifications, which Firefox is not respecting. What type of icon are you seeing? Is it a question mark on a white sheet of paper?

bcooksley wrote:It is probable that the icons in questions were not included in the profile backup that is being made.

The same exact back up was used for firefox in windows, and it worked fine.

What type of icon are you seeing? Is it a question mark on a white sheet of paper?

Neither. As I type this, google search is selected. So I see a blue google icon. If I click the icon, no icons show up in the list of search engines. However, if I click Wikipedia, Amazon or any other search engine, the icon then shows next to the search box for the selected search engine. Also, if I click manage search engines, I see all the icons next to each search engine.

Given that the icons appear when selected, and in the search engine manager, I would suspect instead that this is a Firefox bug rather than anything else.
Just to confirm - you are seeing a blank space where the icon should be for all except the currently selected search engine?

bcooksley wrote:Given that the icons appear when selected, and in the search engine manager, I would suspect instead that this is a Firefox bug rather than anything else.
Just to confirm - you are seeing a blank space where the icon should be for all except the currently selected search engine?

Sounds about right.

Yep, I would definitely suspect a Firefox bug. Just to double confirm - can you try adding one of the search engines which has a missing icon to a new Firefox profile on your linux system, and see if the icon shows up there?

Thanks, but i forgot I tracked this down to a problem(bug?) in the "organize search engines" add on. I disabled it and the icons worked. I am going to try to reinstall it tomorrow after trying to remove any files in the profile folder related to the extension. Is there a way to clear the Firefox app cache? I don't mean the web page cache the cache for the program itself.

Unfortunately i'm not aware of any other cache that Firefox has other than it's web cache, used when browsing the web.