One of the issues Firefox 3 is supposed to fix is the issue of some users losing their bookmarks. So I’m just wondering, out of all the people using the Firefox 3 Betas, have any lost their bookmarks?
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One of the issues Firefox 3 is supposed to fix is the issue of some users losing their bookmarks. So I’m just wondering, out of all the people using the Firefox 3 Betas, have any lost their bookmarks?
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I follow trunk fairly closely and I haven’t lost bookmarks. But I avoid skipping around in versions too much — I use a separate profile when I run Firefox 2, and another separate profile when I run trunk builds more than a month or two old.
From what I remember, and from http://kb.mozillazine.org/Lost_bookmarks, we got reports of people losing bookmarks upon update.
(Unfortunately, I don’t think we ever had a reproducible scenario.)
It would be worth asking this question again once we start upgrading large numbers of users from Firefox 3.0.0.x -> 3.0.0.y to see if the “I lost my bookmarks on upgrade” scenario is fixed.)
Haven’t lost a single bookmark although updating almost every night. Then again, I’ve never lost a single bookmark on any previous Firefox version, either…
No lost bookmarks for me. Though, sometimes I think it would be a favor if I lost all my bookmarks and started all over. 🙂 Too much history, that perhaps I should spend some time deleting a lot of those bookmarks.
No lost for me. But it’s not so easy to use and management.
Only a few people lost their bookmarks and you can’t expect a good answer to your question from the beta testers.
And most Beta Tester are using working systems (no BSOD or other problems with their systems) and they are using NTFS on win32 which should also help to avoid data loss.
I never lost my bookmarks in all this years (8+) with nighly builds for example but I lost prefs.js one time but I had a backup 🙂
I lost bookmarks when I switched from 2.x stable to 3.0 b2 (or was it b1?). Not sure exactly what happened, but it looks like somewhere along the way in the various builds I’ve tested I’d unknowingly ended up with two profiles. I was able to salvage an old bookmarks file from one of those profiles, but I lost about a year and a half’s worth.
Beta 2 ate a few duplicate bookmarks, I think it was as a result of deleting the first found instance, rather than the one I’d accidentally created then tried deleting. I realised when my keywords stopped working. Thankfully nothing major and nothing I’ve *noticed* other than that.
Haven’t lost any bookmarks, I get nightlies almost every day.
I did on the other hand think that I lost my bookmarks once after first trying out the new bookmarking system because I expected the sites that I had “starred” to be under the bookmarks menu like they always have before. I like tagging instead of foldering, but I think it should be easier to get to any site I star before I go an classify it with a tag later on.
I have a ton of bookmarks, like 1,000 or more. Sometimes after Firefox 3 has been running for awhile it won’t show subfolders or even sometimes it won’t show any of my bookmarks until I restart.
I have over 2,335 bookmarks that got exported recently, I’ve not lost bookmarks in recent years, because they have been easy to find. But I do think that the quick bookmarking system in Firefox 3 is going to remove single bookmarks for a lot of people who have the same bookmark url in multiple folders for different purposes, or with and without keywords, because they won’t realize they may have/use/need more than one bookmark for a url. The “OpenBook” extension https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/42 which has been updated for Fx3 can help you see additional properties of the bookmark that was selected (keyword, tags, description, and the folder it is in), which might also help as a reminder of why a bookmark should not be deleted.
I lost some in b2, when I tried to rearrange the folders immediately below the All Bookmarks folder by dropping and dragging the Bookmarks Menu folder (documented bug in b2) which completely broke my bookmarks, AND my carefully backed up copies didn’t correctly back up bookmarks that were outside the Bookmarks Menu folder (Unfiled Bookmarks and so on) (again a documented bug in b2). Fortunately I was able to recover them by coping the broken places db and pulling out the missing bookmarks (by hand). Double fortunately I never keep a large number of bookmarks.
I also heard of some people losing bookmarks when updating from b2 to b3, due to the previous bug of bookmarks NOT in Bookmarks Menu not being saved correctly in HTML export… that one didn’t bite me, though.
I’ve never lost a bookmark since Firefox 0.7, and I’ve auto-updated on the trunk since it was available.
We’ll see in the SUMO and MozillaZine forums whether Fx3 does better, though.
I lost some bookmarks. It may have something to do with my SortBookmarks extension, but I am not entirely sure. I HAVE been moving back and forth between FF2 and FF3 so that may explain it as well.
I’ve lost bookmarks everytime I try to upgrade from FF2 stable to FF3 betas (I tried 1, 3, and now 5). I don’t lose them all – it always loads a certain set that I probably had active 6 or 7 months ago. I rename my betas and start off with a new profile, then copy the data from my FF2 data into it, and it always has this problem. I’ve even tried deleting all instances of the old bookmark data from within my profile, but it still loads incorrectly. Bummer.
I have been using FF3 Beta 4 and now 5 on Ubuntu. Last night I lost my bookmarks and FF refuses to load my home pages all of a sudden. This all happened after running through some updates to enable Java and the Mplayer video player…. Not sure which change blew things up.
I’m NOT going to count on Firefox as my primary browser until the development team gets the bookmarks issue straightened out. I’ve been on the net now for about an hour, even on the Mozilla site and still cannot get information on where the bookmarks that are ACCESSED by Firefox are located. Why not put the damned things in the same location as the program? Also, those of us with a lot of bookmarks are having a problem waiting for the browser to open up the bookmarks file. How about speeding that task up? I am using versions 3.0 beta 5 and 2.0.0.14 and have the same problems with both versions. I do not and never will use Internet Explorer as it is a magnet for viruses and other malware attacks!
it lost all my bookmarks. ubuntu 8, ff 3.0 beta 5
and now it will not install any bookmarks.
I am wondering if backtracking to FF2 solve the problem? I upgraded to FF3 RC1 and lost some of my important bookmarks. Does anyone know if reverting to FF2 stable release might help?
I apologize for not being more specific. I use a Mac and when I updated my Firefox version to the latest RC1, I noticed that some of my bookmarks were missing. I backstepped and installed the latest stable release and now I am ok. It was a relief to find bookmarks again.
I lost both my bookmarks and my tabs
I lost all my bookmarks and tabs. What’s even worse is Firefox wouldn’t allow me to create new bookmarks. But the saved passwords are stored.
i lost all my bookmarks too also some of my passwords i hope the issues gets resolved soon enough
YES !!!!! In fact, I had to completely uninstall Firefoxes and start over with 2..014 !!!
I thought I was going daffy for awhile, I kept replacing bookmarks from the backups, and nothing changed.
Then I deleted EVERY bookmark file and the same missing list shows up STILL !!
WTF ?
Back to FF 2 for me, not to mention 3/4 of my extensions and themes don’t work at all.
And this is RC 1 ? C’mon, Mozilla, get real. This isn’t even workable, unless you don’t like bookmarks or addons.
Yep. Ended up with a corrupted places db on the upgrade from b5 to rc1. No html backup in the backup folder either. Messed with several backups to get one working again, but some bookmarks are not saved. Most of the problem has to do with the “unfiled” folder. There were some changes to it and now it’s not working. Will have to create a new profile and transfer as much over as possible.
I have the same behavior as described by Sanchith. If I open up Firefox rc1, some of my bookmarks are missing (not all, just some). If I shut down rc1 and execute Firefox 2.0.0.14, all my bookmarks are present. This is with XP SP2 (work).
Mac 10.5.3 Here, using FF3 RC1. I was using ff, no probs, then suddenly, i can make changes, subfolder, modify any of my bookmarks. It shows it when i do it, but once I quit and restart FF, all my changes are gone, including any additional bookmarks. All my stuff from the upgrade is still there, just locked in time. I also don’t like how I cant organize the bookmarks very well. Other than that, is fast, and displays most sites very well.
Lost a ton of important bookmarks. Wish I had backed them up 🙁
I upgraded yesterday my iMac to Leopard and today I decided to test the RC3 of Firefox, as I use ONLY Firefox 2 and never Safari.
Unfortunately when RC3 replaced Firefox 2, it imported the almost unused Safari’s bookmarks, without asking me if I would like that. BTW I think I’ve lost 2 years of bookmarks.
Does Anybody knows if is there a security copy located somewhere?
yeah i just installed the newest version of firefox 3 and i was misisng lots of bookmarks
I uninstalled it and reinstalled firefox 2 and all of my bookmarks were still there
Firefox 3 stores the bookmarks in a different file.
Firefox2: bookmarks.html Firefox3: places.sqlite
If you start Firefox3 the first time it imports the bookmarks from the FF2 version. It’s possible that you got a problem with importing and you have an empty places.sqlite.
That’s the reason why you still have the bookmarks in FF2.
If you use both FF2 and FF3 on the system and you add a bookmark with FF3, the new bookmark will not appear in FF2.
I just installed Firefox 3 final, it crashed trying to update my add-ons, and lost all my bookmarks.
I installed the FF3 upgrade and it deleted my Firefox2 bookmarks. Congrats Firefox on breaking the record for the worst update eva! I really regret upgrading. How can i delete this #$%^@#$% upgrade and go back to firefox 2?
Installed the FF3 update today as part of the big Firefox push and lost all my bookmarks that were not in a folder. This means I lose about 1.5 hours of work, and is very very disappointing cause I am on a really tight schedule to finish a project.
I learned my lesson, stick with stable versions and ignore the hype. Not to mention the site was down for half the day, why promote a huge download day if you can’t handle the traffic. =(
installed FF3 today, June 17, and apparently all my bookmarks and history are – poof – gone! This IS TOTALLY NOT ACCEPTABLE. If this is a known problem or intermittent problem they should have warned to take a backup of both!
I’m burned.
installed FF3 today, June 17, and apparently all my bookmarks and history are – poof – gone! This IS TOTALLY NOT ACCEPTABLE. If this is a known problem or intermittent problem they should have warned to take a backup of both!
I’m burned.
I updated to Firefox3 and I lost some of my bookmarks. It’s kinda strange, as FF3 doesn’t loose all my bookmarks. It get’s about 70%, I guess. See, in my personal toolbar folder, I had/have some subfolders. Where there were, say, 4 items before, now there are only 3. I don’t get it. I already deleted all items from FF3, exported those from FF2 and tried to import them with FF3. Doesn’t matter. Exactly the same will show up and exactly the same will be missing. Very poor “stable” release.
I continued to use Firefox 2 on the Mac while testing Firefox 3 RC’s. I shortened my bookmark bar names and added new bookmarks to Firefox 2 several times during this period. When I installed Firefox 3 final today I noticed that it ignored the Firefox 2 changes and simply used the bookmarks it originally imported from RC1 a few months ago.
The new Firefox 3 database system may be better but I sure liked the simplicity of the old bookmark.html file. I’m off to experiment with importing to see if I can straighten this *!$&^* out.
Just wanted to put in a quick update about Firefox 3 losing some bookmarks on upgrade. I am on a Mac so this may not apply to all.
Thanks to the post from Matthias, I had an idea. In that post they mentioned the different files for bookmarks. I figured hey worth a try and installed FF2 into a different folder and launched it from there. Once FF2 was up and running all of the bookmarks where there. I then exported these as an html file.
Now open up FF3 and import the HTML file. It takes a little bit of time to clean them up, but nowhere near the time it would have taken to recreate them. Good luck and hope this helps.
I “lost” my bookmarks when I updated to FF3 on WinXP. It looked like FF3 reverted to an older version of my bookmarks. I found my more recent (so to speak) version at: C:/Documents and Settings/user-name/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/profile-name/bookmarks.html.
Then I imported the found bookmarks.html file through the Organize Bookmarks feature. It didn’t replace the existing “old” bookmarks (and I wouldn’t expect it to), so I had to do some manual reorganizing.
I also noted a bookmarkbackups directory in the profile-name directory. It has HTML backups of my bookmarks from before the upgrade that are correct (haven’t lost data). There is also a JSON file that was created after the upgrade and that is not correct (lost data).
After I got done with my manual reorganization I used FF3’s backup feature which creates a JSON file. It worked. No data loss.
I have just upgraded to FF3 from FF2 – it has loaded a bookmark set from several months ago, not my current bookmarks.
Man if they even made a basic testing for this version they wont get such silly problems, they are starting to loose the skill
yes, I downloaded 3.0 on ‘Download Day’ June 18th, 2008,
and I lost many of my bookmarks! 🙁
I hope that they can be restored somehow!
Thanks for this site and I’ll check back in for info,
Rick
For those who are looking for a way to restore bookmarks from Firefox 2 to the newly installed Firefox 3, you can follow the instructions on the link below to find and view your profile info. From there you can backup or import your bookmarks (which was all I wanted:) by importing the bookmarks.html file in your Firefox 2 profile. Here’s the link:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Backing+up+your+information
Hope this is helpful! It sure saved my day!
Downloaded FF3 on a Mac and PC yesterday–75% of all bookmarks gone. Any attempt to relocate a website and bookmark it anew won’t work–FF3 simply will NOT bookmark many pages. Next, I tried the fix to import html bookmarks recommended in the Mozillazine blog (start Firefox SafeMode, etc)–doesn’t work. Was able to delete FF3 and reload FF2 on the Mac, but no recovery of lost bookmarks but am able there to refind and rebookmark the lost places (not a good solution since I’m talking 100s of lost bookmarks) with FF2 reinstalled. So far, no luck getting FF2 back on the PC, which means the 100s of lost bookmarks cannot be rebookmarked
I upgraded to FF3 (latest release), and my bookmarks from FF2 are there, but when I add new ones, then re-start the machine, my newest bookmarks vanish. It’s very frustrating! For example… I naturally want to bookmark this thread, so I can find it and check for a solution. But, if I happen to restart my computer, the bookmark will be gone. I’ve already lost some very important links… so annoying!
My bookmarks have been off and on since upgrading to Firefox 3. They aren’t, as I originally feared, lost for good and usually a system reboot will bring them back but I find that to be rather a hassle every other time I open Firefox. Also neither restoring from a backup or importing a bookmark file works. Most annoying. I’ve never had any trouble whatsoever with my Firefox bookmarks so FF3 was supposed to slave problems with bookmarks makes me giggle. Instead it’s causing problems!
yeah I lost all mine, well, rolled back to a previous one.
I had Fx3beta a while back but since I was having some issues with it I went back to Fx2. When I updated to Fx3 it loaded all the bookmarks I had back in the beta. I guess the beta uninstall didn’t uninstall properly.
It’s been horrible trying to find my old bookmarks and passwords!
btk
…also I immediately installed Foxmarks to prevent this ever happening again!