Quick tip: When Firefox forgets bookmarks (Shallow Thoughts)

Quick tip: When Firefox forgets bookmarks

Firefox started forgetting new bookmarks. I'd make a few bookmarks, filing them in the right place ... then the next time I started up, they wouldn't be there and I had to go find them again. I tested and verified that it wasn't that I was exiting Firefox uncleanly; even if I ran from the terminal, made a bookmark, and exited, nothing would be saved.

It took me forever to find anything on this with google, so I'm blogging it in the hope of making it easier for the next person to find. It turns out the Mozilla Knowledge Base has a terrific article called Bookmarks not saved that discusses lots of ways this can happen. Go through the list and you'll probably find a solution.

In my case it was the second item: "Places preferences - Firefox 3". It turned out that all three of my boolean browser.places preferences were set to non-default values -- not by me, since I'd never heard of any of the browser.places preferences before. After toggling all three of them by double-clicking, Firefox lost its anterograde amnesia and started remembering new bookmarks again.

Tags: firefox, mozilla, tips
[ 23:01 Mar 18, 2009    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]