Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Mulongo oyo etiyamaki na archive. Tuna motuna mosusu soki osengeli na lisalisi

How can I search for existing "Smart Bookmarks" folders? Need to delete them.

more options

FireFox creates these "Smart Bookmarks" folders (blue icon folders). For some reason, I cannot search for them. I need to search for them, in order to delete them.

For typical users, this would not be a problem. They would just visit the obvious default locations and delete.

But I am a power user who is dealing a large "unified" bookmark collection...with many layers of sub-folders. In my situation, there may exist around 20+ duplicate "Smart Bookmark" folders. They could be anywhere in the large bookmark collection.

I have reason to believe these numerous "Smart Bookmark" folders are causing problems in my "Places.sqlite" file. I won't bother with detailes at the moment, for the sake of brevity. Suffice to say, I need to be able to locate them & delete them.

The bookmark search feature is the only method of doing this. But, as I said, no search results appear when I type things like "Recent Bookmarks" or "Recent Tags" or "Most Visited".

Please help.

FireFox creates these "Smart Bookmarks" folders (blue icon folders). For some reason, I cannot search for them. I need to search for them, in order to delete them. For typical users, this would not be a problem. They would just visit the obvious default locations and delete. But I am a power user who is dealing a large "unified" bookmark collection...with many layers of sub-folders. In my situation, there may exist around 20+ duplicate "Smart Bookmark" folders. They could be anywhere in the large bookmark collection. I have reason to believe these numerous "Smart Bookmark" folders are causing problems in my "Places.sqlite" file. I won't bother with detailes at the moment, for the sake of brevity. Suffice to say, I need to be able to locate them & delete them. The bookmark search feature is the only method of doing this. But, as I said, no search results appear when I type things like "Recent Bookmarks" or "Recent Tags" or "Most Visited". Please help.

All Replies (1)

more options

True that bookmarks folders can't be found via Search Bookmarks in the Library window; Firefox doesn't have a feature to search by folder name and show the folders.


Typically, a Firefox installation will have only one each of the Smart folders - "Recently Bookmarked", "Recent Tags", or "Most Visited".

"Most Visited" would be in the Bookmarks Toolbar folder and the "Recently Bookmarked" and "Recent Tags" Smart folders would be in the Bookmarks Menu folder, at that level not in other folders.

That said, a user might have duplicates of those folders if they Imported bookmarks from other Firefox installations via Exported HTML bookmarks files. Is that what you meant by "unified"?

And if that was done the user would probably have multiple Bookmarks Menu folders, each with the "Recently Bookmarked" and "Recent Tags" Smart folders; along with multiple Bookmarks Toolbar folders, each with a "most Visited" folder, too. As I recall from importing bookmarks.html files a few years ago.


Or possibly a corrupt places.sqlite files produced the duplicated folders and is causing the problems you didn't describe. The Places Maintenance extension can be used to repair the Places database in Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/places-maintenance/