Try using a bookmarking service like Delicious, Pocket, and Evernote. These services usually offer mobile apps and browser extensions that allow you to access your bookmarks from any device, and to save and organize your bookmarks in a more flexible way

Note that IE used a folder structure on the hard drive that with over 12,000 bookmarks could take up 12,000 cluster of 4KB in case storage in the MFT isn't possible. Even Windows has with Edge moved away from using a hard drive based folder structure to using a file based database like Firefox does with SQLite and JSON databases. A database is also easier to backup.

You can possibly use the bookmarks sidebar to have access to multiple folders by opening multiple windows each with the sidebar open in a different folder.

Mitch, cor-el, thanks for your quick replies :)

Mitch, can I use those without having an "account" with those services? I strongly prefer minimizing the internet footprint of info that's nobody's business but mine. Or at least make it less easy for those interested in that info. And I don't need to share my bookmarks with other devices. I need purely local storage and organizing.

cor-el, I don't know what the MFT is (maybe an older disk format if memory serves), but 12k x 4k is is 48 MB (if my math is correct). I may have bytes and bits a bit confused, but I'd gladly offer a few GB for such an important task on my laptop. A tiny price to pay for enormous benefit. And backing up the Favorites folder is a cinch. I can understand why the paradigm change might make sense for casual users, but its really bad for power users.

I already tried your last suggestion but cannot open multiple Library windows. Let me know if you find something otherwise, because that might be a significant positive step.

I'm at wits end about how to tackle this. I've contemplated coming up with a script or something, but even a perfectly working script would be quite suboptimal, as its results would be slightly out-of-date every time I add a new Bookmark. Besides, given my amateur coding skills, that'd probably take me weeks.

Thanks! :)

MFT is the Master File Table used by NTFS disk format used by Windows. Windows can store small file data (I think the limit is 256 bytes) in an entry in the MFT instead of using a cluster. Having a lot of files and folders in one sub folder might affect the performance.

You can open only one Library window. What I meant is to try the bookmarks sidebar (Ctrl+B). You can open as many Firefox windows as you want that each have the sidebar open.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-firefox-sidebar-access-bookmarks-history-synced

Mich, sorry for misspelling your name the first time :). I did a cursory review of Delicious, Pocket and Evernote, and it appears they are cloud-based. If I'm wrong, let me know, but at this point I'm withdrawing my last question. Good day.

cor-el, that's my bad, I should have read more closely. And its a great idea using multiple FF windows each with the sidebar. I AM able to drag & drop between them. It is a DRAMATIC improvement over trying to do this within the single Library environment. However it still falls way short of the old way of doing it between Favorites subfolders, for multiple reasons.

I may be on to a solution though. I'm experimenting with exporting FF Bookmarks to an HTML file and importing them into IE -- which fortunately is still part of Windows. Haha, who would'a thunk it :) ? Doing this seems to have recreated the entire FF Bookmarks folder hierarchy and contents in the standard Favorites folder!!! (Which also is fortunately still part of Windows.)

A lot of them didn't port over due to a bunch of folders in my FF Library having the same name "[New Folder]", which I'll get to in a moment. But it looks promising.

Then it'd be cool if that could be done in the reverse direction. Thereby allowing me to at least occasionally port all the Bookmarks over to IE, do all my organizing in the Favorites folder, and then port them back to FF. Or maybe I would just ditch FF bookmarks altogether and just use the Favorites folder -- in which case I'd need to either come up with a script to Bookmark directly into Favorites, which would be ideal because the Favs would always be current (but I'm not sure if I have the knowledge to do this), or periodically export from Firefox and import to IE.

This would still be suboptimal (relative to FF having a native solution for managing huge volumes in a user-friendly GUI), but its about 2000% better than what I've had up to now. So I'm excited about it, and would like to come back to this space and share my findings with others if I'm successful.

I haven't fully proven this out yet due to the many duplicately named "[Folder Name]" Bookmark folders that FF creates any time I Bookmark MULTIPLE tabs at one time. Which raises the question, is there a way to Bookmark 2 or more tabs and put them in a Library folder of MY choice WITHOUT FF's default, and apparently NOT optional, behavior of creating a new folder with a default name of "[New Folder]"? I DON'T WANT a new folder! I want to use an existing folder. The one I have selected! Currently, if I Bookmark 3 tabs and I want to place them into an existing folder named "Target", what I end up with is 3 Bookmarks inside of a subfolder to "Target" named "[New Folder]". And if I do this another 9 times, I end up with 10 instances of "[New Folder]" inside "Target". Each with its 3 Bookmarks. This is ridiculous, and is part of the nightmare that makes FF Bookmark organization so unwieldy in the first place.

My Bookmarking behavior almost always involves Bookmarking multiple tabs at a time. And I end up with an unmanageable slew of "[New Folder]" that I never wanted in the first place. So to make my potential solution workable, I first have to go thru the tedious task of giving all the "[New Folder]" instances a unique name, so IE can create the destination Windows folder structure in Favorites.

Am I missing something?

If you use "Bookmarks Tabs" to bookmark selected tabs then those bookmarks are always placed in a new folder. Note that Firefox gives you the opportunity to rename the folder. If you want to place multiple bookmark in a specific folder then simply multi-select them (Ctrl + left-click) and drag them into this folder.

cor-el, thanks. And man, that's terrible. By far my biggest use of Bookmarks is to minimize tab hoarding. For example, at this moment I have about 50 tabs open ONLY on the topic we are discussing. Because I'm researching to identify possible solutions. In any given week I may have something like 30 different topics I'm researching. If every one of them had 50 tabs, I would have 1500 tabs open. I just went thru the pain of figuring out how to open Firefox after 8000 tabs kept crashing it. (I had to use Chrome for a few months while I figured that out, which really sucked.)

Question 1: So if I hear you right, to Bookmark a bunch of tabs I have selected, I have no choice but to save them into a folder I don't want to save them into, and then go into the Library, tediously find that folder, and drag the Bookmarks to where I actually want them, and delete the unwanted folder?

Also, I just learned IE is being permanently disabled next year. It blows my mind that the world of computing does not have a solution for people who use high volumes of Bookmarks. The unwanted "[New Folder]" has actually been a CONTRIBUTING CAUSE to my tab hoarding.

Anyway, until the PC world figures out there's a need to be met, I need to come up with my own solution. I'm an amateur VBA guy.

Question 2: Does Firefox have an object model I can access? I didn't find anything online. At a minimum it would be nice to be able to write a VBscript that grabs the key URL data from all the selected tabs and then creates the URL shortcut files in Windows Explorer. Without having to rely on goofy SendKeys type of commands.

Thanks again for your help here, I appreciate it :)

Dropa, thanks for the suggestion but I just need a way to efficiently organize a massive volume of Bookmarks. Imagine having 1000 Bookmarks in 100 folders. The original IE way, I could have, say, 12 of those folders tiled on my Desktop, and very quickly identify which Favorites needed to be moved to which folder, and I could execute the transfers almost instantly. Move these to folder A, move those to C, consolidate folders B and D, make G, H, I J and K subfolders to B, etc..... Firefox's Bookmark tools do not give you the necessary visibility for quickly making these choices and then executing them.

Living in the computer age has had its frustrations, as so many things have gone from good to bad in ways that were quite preventable. I could make a long list. Its supposed the be the opposite of that, right?

Anyway, thanks.

Oh, by the way, in that thought experiment above, now multiply the numbers by about 10.

No, the intention is not to use the "Bookmark Tabs" menu item or a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+D), but bookmark the tabs by dragging them to a folder you already have crated (works for multi-selected tabs). I usually drag the tab to bookmark a tab as that allows to drop the tab in a specific position in a folder.

You can drag the Bookmarks Menu button that shows the bookmarks in a drop-down list from the Customize palette to the Navigation Toolbar. This Bookmarks Menu button has a "View bookmarks sidebar" menu item.

See "How do I add the Bookmarks Menu button to the toolbar?"

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox