Firefox 3 Bookmarking

Mozilla released Firefox 3 during my holiday. So the first thing I had to do was upgrade v2.x to the latest version. Initially everything seemed fine.... INITIALLY...

The trouble began when I tried to add bookmarks. The new bookmark interface (it's called Library) showed up empty. When I tried to add a bookmark, it was impossible to remove it.

"Why would you want to remove a bookmark??" Well, because every bookmark I added ended up with the URL to some ad. At first I thought I had some weird virus or trojan on my Mac. But it seemed that every Mac had the same problem.

E.g. If I added the SnipURL button to my toolbar (which is basically a javascript) it would work, but when I pressed the button, it would show a Google ad. There was also no way of removing or changing it.

Today I started digging into the /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ folder. This was the place where all settings were stored. After fooling around with importing the old bookmarks.html file I ended up with 3 times the amount of bookmarks and no way of deleting them.

It seemed that Firefox 3 uses a SQL-like database called 'places.sqlite'. This database imports the old bookmarks.html file upon the first launch. Possibly, that html file was corrupt (or what ever), because when I removed all bookmarking files (I did make a backup of the old bookmarks.html file!!!!) and relaunched Firefox 3, the bookmarking interface worked correctly. Now I imported the 'old' bookmarks.html file, and everything was back to normal (so far).

For those interested; I removed the following files under the /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ directory;

• Everything with bookmark in it's name (make sure to backup the 'original' bookmarks.html). This includes backups etc.
• places.sqlite

After starting Firefox 3, you may want to import and (re)organize the old bookmarks.

Note that this scenario occured while upgrading from the latest Firefox 2 version to 3 on an Intel Mac. Other scenario's might show similar 'bugs', but are not tested in any way.

Apart from this 'minor' issue, I'm very happy with the new browser. Speedy, less memory consumption, etc.

Now I need to figure out if bookmark-syncing is available in FF3.