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How do I remove ALL Bookmarks from FireFox without destroying my personal settings?

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by FredMcD

FleetCommander
FleetCommander
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I need to remove all of my bookmarks from FireFox--at this point, there's more than 8,500 items in the list!

I've done the "shift-click and delete" method; however it's problematic for two reasons:

(1) I have to delete in batches of 20-30 because the delete function takes a loooooooong time, and

(2) Deleting a large number of bookmarks at once actually crashes the browser, forcing me to go into Task Manager to kill it.

Is there a "one-shot, one-kill" method to remove all of my bookmarks?

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Jason A Schulz

I need to remove all of my bookmarks from FireFox--at this point, there's more than 8,500 items in the list! I've done the "shift-click and delete" method; however it's problematic for two reasons: (1) I have to delete in batches of 20-30 because the delete function takes a loooooooong time, and (2) Deleting a large number of bookmarks at once actually crashes the browser, forcing me to go into Task Manager to kill it. Is there a "one-shot, one-kill" method to remove all of my bookmarks? Thank you for your time and assistance. Jason A Schulz

All Replies (4)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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You can rename (or delete) the places.sqlite file in the Firefox profile folder. This file stores the bookmarks and the history, do you lose both.

You can use this button to go to the current Firefox profile folder:

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Do you use Sync? If so, that could be affecting the deletion speed.

One other thought was be to restore an empty bookmarks backup with just default contents. That would involve several steps, and may also have performance issues. But if you wanted to try it, this would be the general approach:

  1. Create a new Firefox profile (secondary profile, not replacing your main profile)
  2. Generate a backup file in a convenient location (e.g., Desktop)
  3. Switch back to your regular profile
  4. Restore the backup, replacing your existing bookmarks

Might be more trouble than it's worth...

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Do you mean that Firefox actually crashes and brings up the crash reporter or does Firefox merely hang and doesn't respond? Note that you can get a non responsive alert that a script takes to long. I need to clear up the history and remove visits from this domain regularly to avoid getting a too large history. I just checked and it shows about 6000 visits from support.mozilla.org from past weeks. I usually select between 500 and 1000 items starting at the end with Ctrl+Shift+PageUp and delete those that takes a few seconds (less than 10) for each those chunks, but the selection goes slower and slower above about 400 items.

FredMcD
FredMcD
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Use with Extreme Caution;

Bookmark Duplicate Cleaner {web link} Scans for bookmark duplicates and allows you to delete them


Bookmarks Checker - check for bad links {web link} Check favorites for broken or bad links. It checks for bad links and displays a report if it finds something. Check for 404 links, timeout links.