Can't export mobile bookmarks via desktop end!
Hy guys I've been having a horrible time keeping and managing bookmarks on Firefox for Quite a while. Been using the old sync to synchronise my books' from my android to desktop (2 of these for a while) and the experience was mostly choppy, having had a gazillion copies made by the mechanism, of many of my bookmarks (cleaned it up by hand where possible). Thankfully I had the good sense of keeping most of them "hard-copy" as M$ .url files (I'm talking thousands of selective bookmars mostly taken in my personal site).
Unfortunately I've been slacking since my LG G2 has arrived awhile ago, adding the latest lot straight to Moz bookmarks. Now, synchronized to the desktop under a "Mobile Bookmarks" folder, I have been trying to export them through desktop Moz to IE11 unsuccessfully. I'm getting everything but the mobile books' going over to IE favs. I have attempted to copy 'em over to a different bookmarks folder in Moz bookmark manager, but the import/export mechanism insists of ignoring the mobile booksmarks! I'm running out of ideas and really bummed-out by Moz having such a faltering bookmark manager since I have been a boisterous Moz fan for ages now Thanks for any help Nathan
All Replies (11)
Hi Nate, Have you tried the new Firefox Sync? How do I set up Sync on my computer?
The Mobile Bookmark folder is also on the desktop, but if you need to extract them: there are add ons for copying profiles on android such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/andr.../copy-profile/ or copying the bookmarks file on the device using a File explorer: The browser.db file is easy to find after installing the ES File Explorer v. 3 app I was finally able to find it in:
"/ Device / data / data / org.mozilla.firefox / files / mozilla / xxxxxxxx.default" profile folder. them for back up:
Nate,
If you are exporting bookmarks from desktop Firefox using bookmarks.html format, you can open that file type using File > Open File... and view that bookmarks.html file just like viewing a locally saved webpage.
I don't know if Export in bookmarks.html format exports Mobile bookmarks or not; I don't have a Mobile device to test it with.
I opened bookmarks.html and could not find the mobile books' anywhere inside. Seems it is an FF export issue?
I think dragging the Mobile Bookmarks to another location in the books' tree only makes a reference, so no fix there also..
Did you try moving the individual bookmarks out of the Mobile Bookmarks folder? Or did you drag the entire folder to a different location?
I can't test it, but the former might work.
Overall, this doesn't surprise me at all. The ancient bookmarks.html format really hasn't been used in Firefox for much of anything since Firefox 3.0 was released in June 2008, other than keeping it around as the "universal interchange format" that every browser I have ever used has had since the days of the Netscape vs Microsoft browser wars of the late 90's. My gut feeling is that the Mobile Bookmarks folder might be like the Recently Bookmarked and Recent Tags folders - "smart" folders. Not compatible with bookmarks.html format; or maybe just not worth the effort at making that folder compatible with the ancient format and risk breaking it for its' intended purpose - universal interchange with non-Gecko browsers.
You're a genius, it worked. I made a new folder and (ctrl)dragged the books' over. Then transported it to IE for the .url files. I still don't get why the bookmark manager can't just handle drag-dropping the bookmarks directly from the list to a *desktop folder, say.
I'm having a much simpler time managing and synching the half-a-ton quantity of bookmarks through dropbox, rather than any of the major browsers
Modified by Nate3010
There's actually another issue there, the 'modified' field for the resultant files does not reflect the date the bookmarks where taken, but I am having a difficult time tracking where this stems from. I looked at the Mobile Bookmarks folder and am not getting the original 'add' date
There's actually another issue there, the 'modified' field for the resultant files does not reflect the date the bookmarks where taken, but I am having a difficult time tracking where this stems from. I looked at the Mobile Bookmarks folder and am not getting the original 'add' date
Best thing I can recon is the sync itself has stripped the original dates on those booksmarks
Good, we made some progress!
"I still don't get why the bookmark manager can't just handle drag-dropping the bookmarks directly from the list to a *desktop folder, say." One at a time I can drag a bookmark from the library into a Windows desktop folder, but 'drag' multiple highlighted bookmarks from the Library doesn't work "into the folder". Firefox shows the 'drag' is working, but it looks like the Windows desktop folder isn't seeing those multiple bookmarks. Multiple bookmarks 'drag' work into Wordpad, so my guess the "problem" is with Windows desktop folders and not a Firefox limitation.
"I looked at the Mobile Bookmarks folder and am not getting the original 'add' date" I am no good at working with an Sqlite manager to query the places.sqlite file and look at that type of data, but my guess is that Mozilla decided that the "add date" (and "most recent visit date") wasn't important enough to include in the sync process on Mobile Firefox versions.
Also, keep in mind that computer data bases don't use human readable mm/dd/yyyy dates data, that use Unix Epoch time for recording events that have occurred since the base date of Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 GMT, down to the 'second' or 'millisecond'. Each computer program converts that type of time to human-readable format and adds (or subtracts) the offset from GMT for the display of the time. You can see a time converter JavaScript 'program' here: http://www.esqsoft.com/javascript_examples/date-to-epoch.htm