You’ll be going to see more globe icons to the left of website addresses in the address bar of Firefox instead of favicons from Firefox 14 release onwards as there are more websites in the World that do not use SSL Certificates or have mixed content. And padlock icon only appears for sites that uses secured connection. From ages till now, Firefox is showing any site’s favicon in the address bar as part of site-identity block. There are some sites that use padlock as favicon, there is a chance of users misunderstanding those sites as secured on unsecured connection, that’s why Mozilla made this change which you can spot in latest Aurora build.
No Favicons for websites in the Address bar from Firefox 14 onwards
If you don’t know: Site-identity button appears on the location bar to the left side of URL, when you click on it the following information related to the site is shown
The site you’re viewing encrypted or not? and site’s identity information is displayed which includes : ownership details, verification status, if verified who verified it, etc..
“Websites that use SSL certificates with Extended Validation will now have a green padlock next to the certificate owner’s organization name.”
“Websites that use SSL certificates without Extended Validation will now have a grey padlock. The effective hostname will no longer appear next to the padlock. This information is redundant with our darkening of the effective hostname in the website address. “
“Websites that do not use SSL certificates or have mixed-content will fallback to a globe icon.” Jared shared on Mozilla blog.
Only the site favicon has been removed in the address bar and favicon still be shown on: tabs, bookmarks and for awesome bar suggestions.