HI

Sync will carry across the bookmark and from what you saying, it it working for you. What it does not carry across is the "favicon", the coloured bookmark icon.

These are created when you visit a page, so should reappear over time as you visit these pages again.

Hi Seburo,

Thank you for your explanation. I do appreciate; it works ! Visiting a bookmarked page indeed makes the 'favicon' - as you called it - appear on the second computer, in full colour.

BUT: I find it remarkable - and quite annoying ! - that it seems to be necessary to re-visit each individual bookmarked site for achieving this result. Having several hundreds of individual pages bookmarked, this method seems to me a quite undesirably cumbersome way to get the icons for all of those to reappear.

When you say that a favicon is created when one visits a page, I assume that it is Firefox which attaches this to the bookmark. SO: does anybody have an explanation why these favicons - once created and attached to the bookmarks by Firefox - are not automatically CO-exported by Firefox's syncing ? Did they just 'forget' to add this function? Or is there a more technical reason ?

Sync works by using the JSON format for bookmarks, a format that was originally used for the automatic daily bookmarks backups in Firefox which came about with Firefox 3.0 when the places.sqlite file was instituted for storage of bookmarks, browsing, and download history in one file.

I don't know what the "overhead" of the Favicons are in JSON or the SQLITE format file, but I do know that with the old bookmarks.html format, which was used prior to Firefox 3.0, the overhead of those Favicon data "images" was very high. I discovered that when I would take a bookmarks.html file and run a bit of JavaScript on that file to "strip out" the Favicons so I could use the resulting html file on my personal bookmarks so that I could access my bookmarks from any computer on the internet that I might be using, minus the Favicons (which won't display in a webpage), so it was "useless data" on the web. Using a file that started out at 2.5MB I would end up with a file that was like 200KB in size. So over 90% of the original file I started with was Favicon data, the actual bookmarks were less than 10% of the file size - and that was with maybe only 50% of my bookmarks even having a Favicon! Now-a-days I am seeing more like 90% of my bookmarks having their own Favicon.

That said, Firefox 55 has a different method of saving the Favicon data images. No longer saved in the places.sqlite file as has been done since Firefox 3.0 came out in June 2008, but saved in a new favicons.sqlite file. Maybe that file make it easier to include the Favicon data in the Sync process.

@ the-edmeister:

While not solving my problem by providing an easy solution, your reaction certainly offers an interesting insight. For me, as a technical nincompoop, your elicidation is 'meisterhaft' [German for : masterful, haha ] , because understandable. I had no idea those favicons make up such a large percentage of the bookmark data !

I understand from all this that a reason why Firefox doesn't sync the favicons along with the bookmarks might just be that the file containing these icons was considered too heavy a load, and - maybe - not a necessity. I hope someone from Firefox will deign to put in a reaction, to confirm or deny this ?

I am curious to see if it will be decided at some future update to tie the favicons.sqlite file into the syncing option (again). That certainly would add functionality. For now, for us it is too late: my wife has just spent more than an hour (!) at the new computer busily clicking on all those 'orphaned' bookmarks in order to get those logos attached again (method as explained earlier by @ Seburo)...

Thanks !

It shocked me when I discovered how "large" the Favicon data was vs how "small" the data was for each bookmark.

There used to be at least one extension which could be used to "grab" all the Favicons, but sadly there is no compatible extension with that feature at this time.