title: Bookmark backups link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/bookmark-backups/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 301 created: 2009/06/24 16:01:47 created_gmt: 2009/06/24 16:01:47 comment_status: open post_name: bookmark-backups status: publish post_type: post

Bookmark backups

Why doesn’t anything show up in my Firefox bookmarks.html anymore?

(you know, the file that sits under ~/.mozilla/firefox/[profilename] that you used to restore your bookmarks after re-imaging the system last time)

Because the developers over at Mozilla decided it’s much better to store that kind of info in the “universally understood and easy to manipulate” json (Java Script Object Notation) format and now create time stamped .json files under bookmarkbackups. Only problem with this approach is that you can’t import a .json file, you can only use it to restore — overwriting anything you may already have.

JSON is to Firefox bookmarks what VBScript is to … scripting.

Anyway, while I don’t have a way to edit or convert .json backups to editable .html for import, there is a way to get Firefox to start saving its bookmark data to bookmarks.html again.

To do this dial up about:config and search for:

browser.bookmarks.AutoExport

By changing the value from false to true you’ll be instructing the browser to save existing bookmarks to bookmarks.html on every exit.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo