I believe that transferring bookmarks in HTML requires deleting separators.
I need to move book marks from one instance of Firefox to another. Before following the instructions to export the bookmarks as an HTML file, I deleted items and sets I did not need. This left a large number of horizontal lines in the bookmarks list. After exporting to a removable medium, I opened the file and saw the bookmarks listed in Firefox on the source machine.
When I imported the HTML file to the target instance, only a few of the bookmarks were visible. When I looked at the file using Firefox, most of the entries were non-Latin characters. I tired several variations with worsening results. Eventually, I figured out that the horizontal lines were separators. I opened the bookmark list on the source machine in a sidebar and removed the separators. The next attempt to import retained the clean HTML on the target instance and the import was complete.
I did not try to reproduce the failure.
Both machines are Dell computers using version 50.0.2 64-bit.
If you need more information, please let me know as quickly as practical as the source machine is a work laptop and I will be unemployed and return the machine at the end of the month.
Regards Alan Berow
All Replies (4)
Hi, thanks for the information. It should not matter that there are separators left or not as I leave some behind when editing my bookmarks that I have had since 95.
There possibly is a problem in the Profile that caused this.
- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles
- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/export-firefox-bookmarks-to-backup-or-transfer
Type or Copy/Paste about:support to the Address Bar then Enter and accept. Go all the way down to Places Database and click Verify Integrity.
I can not seem to find more on that.
Please let us know if this solved your issue or if need further assistance
Thanks for the quick response. I posted in the hope of helping someone else or providing an opportunity for a developer to avoid a problem. I was able to import the bookmarks after I removed the separators. Note: they were in the bookmark list, not the bookmark toolbar.
Given that I was recovering my PC from an OS reload, I am not willing to take the risk of trying to reproduce the problem.
The database integrity check passed.
Regards Alan Berow
What kind of non Latin characters are in the file? Are that Unicode (UTF-8) characters or ANSI characters in the upper range (0x80-0xff)?
Did you edit the bookmarks.html file or did you remove (delete) unwanted bookmarks in the Bookmarks Manager (Library) before exporting?
If you edit the file in a text editor then the file can easily get corrupted. Separators are HR tags and folders are H3 tags.
Thanks for the response. I was not in problem solving mode at the time and neither analyzed the characters for UTF-8 or other standard, nor kept a copy to do it now. The file in my wastebasket is the one that worked. It does contain extra separators, though all of the characters are valid Latin characters. The only edits I did to the file were within Firefox to remove the unwanted duplication and old bookmarks.