The worst thing a browser can do
By Andrew Smith
You know what is the worst thing that a web browser can do? I just learned what – lose bookmarks. Not just the favicons, not just the order, not even the URLs – lose all the bookmarks completely. This is what Firefox 3 did.
As part of the upgrade I made sure to recreate the profile (who knows what kinds of crap an upgrade might cause) so it was a fresh install. About a week later – my bookmarks are gone:
In case you need a translation – that’s the bookmarks menu with no bookmarks in it.
So what do I do? I go to my profile folder, see a folder there called ‘bookmarkbackups’. Pretty quickly I figure out that this can be restored using the bookmarks manager. So I do that, and my bookmarks are back. I may have lost one or two new ones, but disaster has been averted.
Two days later, the same shit happens again. Only this time I was busy doing real work and didn’t bother to restore the bookmarks right away. I think that was a mistake.
It seems there’s some sort of rotation going on in ‘bookmarkbackups’, the kind of mindless rotation for any kind of backup – “Since you haven’t complained, I will assume that you like the bookmarks the way they are, I will delete the oldest backup and replace it with what I have now”. And guess what I end up with? That’s right, no backup.
There is a something in the backup folder called bookmarks-2008-06-23.json, but firefox won’t restore from it, claiming “Impossible de traiter le fichier de sauvegarde.” – that’s roughly “Corrupted backup file”. Great.
The story’s ending isn’t all bad. Just after the upgrade I got the urge to backup my profile folder, and I did. So my bookmarks are still recoverable. But I’ll be damned if I’m using Firefox 3.0 as my main browser again. Maybe this is just one little bug and they’ll fix it, but maybe not..
The sad thing is I’ve watched this movie before – a great product being lost because of a lack of resources. Seamonkey was killed, Thunderbird is getting killed, I wonder if Firefox for Linux is next.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:23
try storing your bookmarks on google boomkarks, it’s where i keep mine pretty useful in situations like these
June 25th, 2008 at 7:34
True dat. A few months before starting our first year at Seneca, I got in the habbit of formatting & reinstalling my OS on a monthly basis… I was learning linux and trying out different flavours etc… i was also pretty paranoid about MS viruses… anywho, the point is I got used to losing my bookmarks and learned to live w/o the feature.
What is needed is a user operated, easy to use, bookmark back-up system that isn’t operated by a 3rd party that wants you to store all your personal info on their servers.
Should be easy as Bookmarks->backup to tgz->Save Bookmarks->restore from tgz->Restore.
I’d do this extension… but I just dont have the bandwidth atm.
June 25th, 2008 at 19:48
Hi Andrew! I worked on the bookmarks component in Firefox 3. We went to great lengths to make bookmarks safer than in Firefox 2 (for which this was a regular problem). Clearly this is not happening in your case. I’d be glad to look at your profile to figure out the cause of this. Please email me at dietrich at mozilla dot com if you’re open to that.
Also, the bookmarks.html file in your profile directory contains all the bookmarks from Firefox 2. It is not touched by Firefox 3. You can always restore those bookmarks, pulling your old bookmarks into Firefox 3, using the steps here:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Importing+Bookmarks+from+an+HTML+File
Cheers,
-dietrich
June 25th, 2008 at 20:49
I’ll probably file a bug. There’s nothing really to see in my profile, it’s a clean FF3 profile plus imported bookmarks.
Thanks for the offer to take a look though.