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installed latest non-ESR version of Firefox over ERS, all bookmarks are gone

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An application requested the latest version of Firefox. I installed it. I found I had two versions of Firefox installed. One was ESR. The latest version of Firefox had bookmarks. The ESR version did not have bookmarks. I checked with IT support and found I needed to uninstalled the latest non-ESR version. Now I have no bookmarks. It doesn't matter how I try and import them, they do not display in the bookmarks library. When I'm on a website that I know is bookmarked, the star turns blue. The bookmarks toolbar has nothing on it. They must be somewhere, but there is a disconnect. Without bookmarks, I cannot continue using Firefox.

An application requested the latest version of Firefox. I installed it. I found I had two versions of Firefox installed. One was ESR. The latest version of Firefox had bookmarks. The ESR version did not have bookmarks. I checked with IT support and found I needed to uninstalled the latest non-ESR version. Now I have no bookmarks. It doesn't matter how I try and import them, they do not display in the bookmarks library. When I'm on a website that I know is bookmarked, the star turns blue. The bookmarks toolbar has nothing on it. They must be somewhere, but there is a disconnect. Without bookmarks, I cannot continue using Firefox.

Chosen solution

Yes, rename the places.sqlite to places.sqlite.bak and see if that fixes the problem.

And I strongly encourage you move to a more recent Firefox...

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All Replies (13)

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That's very strange. Do you find them if you go to all bookmarks and search the bookmarks?

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No. If I go to Show All Bookmarks, everything is blank.

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Interesting. It would appear your bookmarks are actually broken for some reason.

Can you open the Browser Console and see if there are any errors (Ctrl+Shift+J)

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Here is the browser console. Let me know if I need to click a specific button.

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Can you try renaming the file places.sqlite in your profile directory to places.sqlite.bak and then restarting Firefox? IT should import from the last backup. Don't delete, just rename.

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Can you also provide the exact 52 ESR version you are using? We had put in a fix for this.

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The version is 38.2.1. I cannot find file places.sqlite in any of the Mozilla Firefox folders. Is it possible it was removed when I uninstalled the latest non-ESR version?

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You are running Firefox 38.2.1?

The places.sqlite is located in your profile folder.

On Windows, that's Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\PROFILENAME

Also see:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data

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Here are the places.sqlite files in the directory you provided. Should I delete or rename one of these files?

Yes, we are running 38.2.1.

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Chosen Solution

Yes, rename the places.sqlite to places.sqlite.bak and see if that fixes the problem.

And I strongly encourage you move to a more recent Firefox...

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Thank you mkaply. You have saved me! Our IT infrastructure team out of Europe is not quick to install changes. Is there another ESR release? They first have to make sure it works with every piece of software we have installed.

Thanks, again!

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Glad it fixed things!

The latest ESR is 60. That is a VERY old version of Firefox. There have been ESR 45, ESR 52 and ESR 60 released last week.

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As a footnote for future reference, if you need to use two versions of Firefox on the same computer that are separated by many intermediate versions (for example ESR 52 and regular 60), you can create separate profiles so that file format changes don't affect the older version. This involves many steps and customizing shortcuts, so if it turns out to be something you need, you could start a new thread on that.