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making firefox bookmarks work in safari

ZombieChick
ZombieChick
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My PC recently crashed and I am now used an iMac. I have my old hard drive connected to the Mac and want to know how I can pull my old Firefox bookmarks off the old PC hard drive and import them into Safari? I hadn't done a Bookmarks backup for at least a year :-( but I read somewhere that Firefox backs them up automatically every day so I wondered: a) Where would I find that file? b) How can I import that into Safari? I've looked around for an answer to this question, but nearly all the solutions involve exporting the bookmarks from within Firefox on the PC but I can't access that! (or can I?!)

Thanks in anticipation of some help :-)

Jo

My PC recently crashed and I am now used an iMac. I have my old hard drive connected to the Mac and want to know how I can pull my old Firefox bookmarks off the old PC hard drive and import them into Safari? I hadn't done a Bookmarks backup for at least a year :-( but I read somewhere that Firefox backs them up automatically every day so I wondered: a) Where would I find that file? b) How can I import that into Safari? I've looked around for an answer to this question, but nearly all the solutions involve exporting the bookmarks from within Firefox on the PC but I can't access that! (or can I?!) Thanks in anticipation of some help :-) Jo

All Replies (3)

the-edmeister
the-edmeister
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Are you unable to install a Firefox 3+ version on that iMac?
Firefox can handle its' own bookmark data file (sqlite) and the bookmark backup files (JSON), but AFAIK Safari can't - it uses a different format for bookmarks storage.

To import bookmarks from a different browser, a bookmarks.html file is needed. That is the interchange format that (almost) all browsers use to export bookmarks / favorites into a file that a different brand browser can import.

To generate and export a bookmarks.html file the browser has to be running. I am not aware of an external method of creating an HTML file from a JSON backup. Maybe someone else will have a suggestion.

ZombieChick
ZombieChick Question owner
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Thanks for this info. I've installed Firefox 3.6.10 on the Mac now. I've also found the most recent .JSON file from my old PC drive and copied it into the Firefox profile folder on the Mac (Library\Application Support\Firefox\Profiles\[nonsense string]\Bookmarkbackups.

So my new question is, how do I make Firefox use this file for the bookmarks? There are no other .json files in there, so I would have thought when I relaunched Firefox it would use this one as the most recent set of bookmarks? Clearly not, any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Jo

ZombieChick
ZombieChick Question owner
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Ah don't worry, I've found the places.sqlite file, replaced the current one with my old one et voila, all is working fine. Thanks for the help! Jo