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

My bookmakrs disappeared 10/17/2019 mid afternoon. When I go to show all bookarks it gives and error listed below:

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity Location: chrome://browser/content/places/places.xul Line Number 27, Column 1:<window id="places" </p>

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity Location: chrome://browser/content/places/places.xul Line Number 27, Column 1:<window id="places"

All Replies (1)

Hi wml2, I'm sorry to hear about this problem. Could you first make a backup of your "bookmarkbackups" folder? I'll mention the steps in a minute.

Next, have you exited and restarted Firefox since this problem started? If exiting and restarting Firefox doesn't help, please shut down and restart Windows. The point of this is to free any file locks and complete any deferred updates.

If the problem continues, I suggest running the "Verify Integrity" function to check on the database that stored bookmarks and history. Steps for that below as well.

Backing up the Backups

Firefox makes approximately daily backups of your bookmarks. They are compressed, so not possible to open directly, but may be important for recovery. To back those up:

Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either

  • "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

In the first table on the page, on the Profile Folder row, click the "Open Folder" button. This should launch a new window listing various files and folders in Windows Explorer.

Right-click into the bookmarkbackups folder and click Copy. Then open a folder outside of any Firefox folder (such as Documents), right-click a blank area, and click Paste. It's also worth taking a peek inside to make sure there are recent files (the file names contain a date).

Verify Integrity

Open Firefox's Troubleshooting Information page using any of these methods:

  • "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

Near the bottom, there is a section titled Places Database -- that's the file which stores history and bookmarks. Click the button labeled Verify Integrity. There may be a 10-15 second delay before results appear.

If all is well, the report that appears below the button should start with:

> Task: checkIntegrity
+ The places.sqlite database is sane
+ The favicons.sqlite database is sane

Does yours say that, or something else? You can select and copy the report, and then paste it into a reply for review and comment.