If the permissions are incorrect, there's a good chance that would cause something like what you're seeing. In order to check the permissions, you can do this:

1. Close Firefox.
2. Open the finder.
3. Open the "Go" menu > Go to Folder
4. type "~/Library/Application Support/Firefox" and choosse "Go"
5. Select the "profiles" folder from the list and open it
6. Select the folder with the word "default" in it.
7. Open the File menu > Get Info
8. In the "Sharing and Permissions" section, you should see your username listed as having "read and write". If you don't, click the lock icon in the bottom-right corner of the window, enter your password, and then change the permissions to "read and write" from the dropdown.
9. Open the folder and repeat the process for each subfolder within it.

Does that work?

thank you, i will check today and report back the results.

I checked the permissions and the only user on the mac has read-write in that firefox profiles *default* folder.

OK, could you also check the permissions on the files inside that folder? Specifically, try checking the places.sqlite, places.sqlite-shm, and places-sqlite-wal files. In order to try to figure out the issue, I set my places.sqlite to read-only, and when I do that I get the exact same issue you've described (clicking on the bookmark star doesn't do anything), so I'm guessing that's the issue.

If you have read and write permissions on those files and this is still happening, could you also try this?

1. open Firefox.
2. Go to Tools menu > Web Developer > Browser Console.
3. Click on the bookmarks star a few times.
4. Take a screenshot of any errors that you see in the console.

This has been resolved. What i did was create a new blank firefox profile, then copy the places.sqllite and other files from the "corrupt" profile, I made that new profile as default and that seemed to correct my inability to save bookmarks while still maintaining my bookmark library and other cached info.

thank you for all your help folks.