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Bookmarks no longer sort / take ages to sort

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Running Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows 7 Ultimate. Recently downgraded from Firefox 4 beta 7 due to too many addons not being updated or compatible with the betas yet. Anyway, my problem is this:

I have a fair amount of bookmarks. 606 at the moment. 99% of them are not in subfolders - they are just loose under Bookmarks Menu. This is how I like it, since I don't actually use the menu anyway, I call up my bookmarks from the location bar by typing. So I don't see much point in organising them all. However, I do need them sorting alphabetically, since I also use the Firefox Home app on my iPod Touch, and here I wish to see all my bookmarks in a nice long sorted list. Now, before 3.6.13, I never had a problem with sorting... I'd simply right-click "Organise Bookmarks" on the Bookmarks menu, and choose "Sort By Name". This would sort everything nicely. Another way was to open the Library, and do the same thing on the Boomarks Menu item in the navigation tree on the left. All bookmarks would be sorted instantly and perfectly.

However, in Firefox 4 beta 7, it would sort them very slowly, in fact you'd actually SEE bookmarks moving up and down the list in slow-motion! If done via the Library, the context-menu would actually stop appearing on right-click. Performing a right-click in another application or elsewhere in Firefox would restore the menu. Downgrading back to 3.6.13 has not resolved these problems. So is this a new problem, or something left over from Firefox 4 beta 7?

On the same topic, using the column headers to sort in the Library did not used to actually save them in this order, since performing a sync with another computer/device would show them unsorted on the new device. Is this now fixed, or it it only intended to sort that current view and not be persistent?

Running Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows 7 Ultimate. Recently downgraded from Firefox 4 beta 7 due to too many addons not being updated or compatible with the betas yet. Anyway, my problem is this: I have a fair amount of bookmarks. 606 at the moment. 99% of them are not in subfolders - they are just loose under Bookmarks Menu. This is how I like it, since I don't actually use the menu anyway, I call up my bookmarks from the location bar by typing. So I don't see much point in organising them all. However, I do need them sorting alphabetically, since I also use the Firefox Home app on my iPod Touch, and here I wish to see all my bookmarks in a nice long sorted list. Now, before 3.6.13, I never had a problem with sorting... I'd simply right-click "Organise Bookmarks" on the Bookmarks menu, and choose "Sort By Name". This would sort everything nicely. Another way was to open the Library, and do the same thing on the Boomarks Menu item in the navigation tree on the left. All bookmarks would be sorted instantly and perfectly. However, in Firefox 4 beta 7, it would sort them very slowly, in fact you'd actually SEE bookmarks moving up and down the list in slow-motion! If done via the Library, the context-menu would actually stop appearing on right-click. Performing a right-click in another application or elsewhere in Firefox would restore the menu. Downgrading back to 3.6.13 has not resolved these problems. So is this a new problem, or something left over from Firefox 4 beta 7? On the same topic, using the column headers to sort in the Library did not used to actually save them in this order, since performing a sync with another computer/device would show them unsorted on the new device. Is this now fixed, or it it only intended to sort that current view and not be persistent?

All Replies (2)

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I have the same problem on Firefox 3.6.13, except I experience this when using the SortPlaces add-on. I have not tried to use the built-in sorting mechanism, so I'm not sure about that.

It appears to have something to do with Firefox Sync. When I disable Sync, the bookmarks are sorted instantly. I think this started occurring after the most recent update of the Sync add-on, but I cannot be certain.

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The developer of SortPlaces has a support page here.
http://www.andyhalford.com/sortplaces/support.html
Not a lot of information there, but some tips about reading and sending him error messages about SortPlaces problems - so he can help you figure it out.

It's a good idea to turn off Sync while sorting bookmarks, so that Firefox isn't sending each and every change to the Sync server as it happens. Turn it back on when you're done with sorting.