Re-Migrating to Firefox 3

Dear Lazyweb,

I’ve upgraded to Firefox 3 RC 1 and now Firefox gives me an old version of my bookmarks file. Clearly, migration ran when I tested an earlier version, and isn’t rerunning. How can I persuade it to do so? I can’t be the only person with this problem, surely?

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/default.xxx/ ; rm -f *.sqlite

might work, but surely there’s a cleaner way?

15 thoughts on “Re-Migrating to Firefox 3

  1. I haven’t tested this so general disclaimer that this might go wrong, but I think if you set browser.places.importBookmarksHTML to true then it will reimport the html on next startup

  2. I haven’t tested this so general disclaimer that this might go wrong, but I think if you set browser.places.importBookmarksHTML to true then it will reimport the html on next startup

  3. Maybe someone can do better, but having seen this question asked a couple of times, I think the answer is that you’re not the only one, but deleting the FF3 database files is the best way. (You could use import, but then you’ll end up with extra bookmarks…).

    I think there were a couple of comments in a bug somewhere about dealing with this, but it was decided that adding extra code to deal with the situation where someone has switched between Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 on the same profile wasn’t worth it…

  4. The (relatively) new SUMO forum had a similar issue today: link

    Would love to have you post there if you’re having problems.

  5. places.importBookmarksHTML = true and then restarting is the way to go. Just remember it will import your bookmarks.html in your profile dir but your existing bookmarks will also remain; delete ’em first or else you’ll have duplicates.

    There’s a similar setting that will recreate the smart bookmarks in the toolbar, which is useful since their defaults have been changed between Firefox 3 betas.

  6. But that setting won’t migrate all the other stuff (history, form data etc.) which is now stored in .sqlite files, will it?

  7. sounds like firefox still has some way to go before the average man in the street can use it!

  8. sounds like firefox still has some way to go before the average man in the street can use it!
    Posted by: ed

    If by “use it” you mean “switch back and forth seamlessly between major versions, while keeping the profile data exactly in sync”, then you’d be correct.

  9. Daniel: I agree that the way you put it, it’s a non-goal. But a pref, switch or button which said “please re-perform the migration process” would have been useful to the probably fairly large number of testers who tried out a Firefox 3 pre-release at some point, went back to Firefox 2, and now want to upgrade for good. I guess it’s a bit late now. But we can at least document it prominently.

  10. You can get your bookmarks imported from the Bookmarks Organizer, there’s an “Import and Export” menu there that will let you choose your bookmarks.html file and import it.

  11. Ted: Yes, but that would give you duplicates of all those bookmarks you’ve had for a long time.

  12. Gerv: Yup, I totally agree. I just was responding to ed’s implication that this issue significantly affects the average user. (I don’t think it does.)

  13. This is easy to fix. Instead of doing an Import, do a Restore. Problem solved.

  14. I have the same problem… finally I re-migrate back to FF2 and now I´m waiting and looking for answer…

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