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how do i import Firefox bookmarks into Firefox history?

  • 6 replies
  • 3 have this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by Kadir Topal

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I have years worth of favorite web pages stored in several bookmark folders, but i no longer want them there anymore, and i want to place them directly into my history.

Is there a way to do this without opening up every single webpage? Opening all tabs will undoubtedly freeze my Firefox indefinitely, there must be another way around this?

I have years worth of favorite web pages stored in several bookmark folders, but i no longer want them there anymore, and i want to place them directly into my history. Is there a way to do this without opening up every single webpage? Opening all tabs will undoubtedly freeze my Firefox indefinitely, there must be another way around this?

All Replies (6)

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Hi CuriousMew, I don't know of any method to do that, but you could just let it open all in tabs over night and when you come back all will be listed in the history. Virtual memory will make sure that you don't run out of memory, unless you have tens of thousands of bookmarks.

However: you should consider that the history is only kept for a limited time, and any page not bookmarked or visited during that time will be lost.

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We do not know your reason for asking this, and what it is that you are trying to achieve (beyond the fact you wish to have them in History).

An alternative that may be appropriate to consider is backing up the bookmarks by exporting them, then deleting many of the old folders. (There are several add-ons available that will sort bookmarks or add functionallity e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sortplaces/ )

That way they may be kept in case they are ever needed again, you could reimport them into another Firefox profile (From Firefox 13 onwards it will probably be possible to generate new profiles with a few mouse clicks ).

If you export as HTML as well as the default .json you get a file that is easy to open,(firefox will open it) and easy to edit (Many word processors may handle that type of file)

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@KadirTopal Is there a way to extend the history's expiration? I thought the history was held at a nearly unlimited amount? I have only recently enabled Firefox's history setting partially because of that very reason (and because I'm looking into Firefox Sync). I should think that Firefox would be able to handle trillions of url without faltering, url's are just a bunch of text?

Unfortunately letting the tabs go overnight is not an option; Firefox will freeze way before it will decide to do anything too productive, 10 tabs at once is pushing it. I've got about 2,000 bookmarks that i would like to have historified, but i would also hate to see them disappear just because i never used them occasionally :(

If i type in "sushi recipe" into the FF navigation bar, i want to see that same sushi listing i thought up a year ago.

Modified by Curious Mew

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I am sure Kadir will give a detailed answer, but meanwhile note History in Firefox is far from unlimited, and is stored in the same database ( places.sqlite ) as bookmarks see for instance

 " .... - some users, with a really huge (tens of thousands) amount of bookmarks, were constantly losing history due to automatic expiration trying to keep the database to a sane size, from now on history of the last 7 days will not be considered expirable.  .... {from http://blog.bonardo.net/2011/09/02/changes-to-places-memory-consumption-expiration-and-performances }"  

You may also be interested in https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Places_Expiration

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The History is much more vulnerable to dataloss than the Bookmarks. You can export (backup) the bookmarks, but you can't do that with the history. If there are problems with the places.sqlite file then you lose all history. So it is best to stay with bookmarks if you are worried about losing links.

Modified by cor-el

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Like others have said, the history is highly volatile, even more so now than before. That's why today you can't specify a certain time frame for the history to be saved anymore. You should definitely keep your bookmarks separate from your history, if you want to keep them.