Could you give an example of what you are trying to do? For example, you have a list of your bookmarks on the right side of the Library window, or in the Bookmarks Sidebar, and they are in their natural (unsorted) order, and you move one of them up or down the list? It doesn't stick?

One suggestion I've seen in past threads was to turn off Bookmark Sync in case the old position is getting restored from the cloud. See this article for steps to do that: How do I choose what information to sync on Firefox?

Thanks for the reply. I don't use sync because it never ceased to make a horrible mess of my bookmarks. What I'm trying to do is simply edit where the bookmarks and folders go in my bookmarks list, especially the toolbar. Up until fairly recently, I could just drag them around, both in normal browser window and in the 'show all bookmarks' view. I click on a bookmark or folder and try to drag and it does nothing, like it's a fixed list. It's a very annoying issue since I often like to rearrange bookmarks/folders. "Rearranging manually" is still shown as doable in the help section in support.mozilla.org under 'Sort your bookmarks to quickly find the ones you want' https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sort-bookmarks-quickly-find-ones-you....

Re-arranging manually still works for me on the Bookmarks menu and Bookmarks Toolbar.

Can you make sure you do not have the extension Default Bookmark Folder enabled? It isn't completely compatible with Firefox 85. Hopefully will be fixed soon.

If that's not the cause of the problem, could you let us know what you get when you run the "Verify Integrity" function. That's here:

Open Firefox's Troubleshooting Information page using any of these methods:

• "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
• (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
• type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

Near the bottom, there is a section titled Places Database -- that's the file which stores history and bookmarks. Click the button labeled Verify Integrity. There may be a 10-15 second delay before results appear.

If all is well, the report that appears below the button should start with:

> Task: checkIntegrity
+ The places.sqlite database is sane
+ The favicons.sqlite database is sane

Does yours say that, or something else? You can select and copy the report, and then paste it into a reply for review and comment.

Thanks again. I don't have Default Bookmark Folder. FF got updated the last time I restarted, but no joy there. I did the verification and I'm all sane and coherent, or I should say FF is, I'm no where near that:

Task: checkIntegrity + The places.sqlite database is sane + The favicons.sqlite database is sane > Task: invalidateCaches + The caches have been invalidated > Task: checkCoherence + The database is coherent > Task: expire + Database cleaned up > Task: originFrecencyStats + Recalculated origin frecency stats > Task: vacuum + Initial database size is 76800KiB + The database has been vacuumed + Final database size is 76800KiB > Task: stats + Places.sqlite size is 76800KiB + Favicons.sqlite size is 57248KiB + pragma_user_version is 54 + pragma_page_size is 32768 + pragma_cache_size is -2048 + pragma_journal_mode is wal + pragma_synchronous is 1 + History can store a maximum of 146450 unique pages + Table moz_places has 145978 records + Table moz_historyvisits has 216391 records + Table moz_inputhistory has 12 records + Table moz_hosts has 0 records + Table moz_bookmarks has 8894 records + Table moz_keywords has 34 records + Table sqlite_sequence has 1 records + Table moz_anno_attributes has 4 records + Table moz_annos has 1315 records + Table moz_items_annos has 3 records + Table sqlite_stat1 has 20 records + Table moz_bookmarks_deleted has 6 records + Table moz_meta has 8 records + Table moz_origins has 10983 records + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_inputhistory_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_hosts_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_keywords_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_anno_attributes_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_bookmarks_deleted_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_origins_1 + Index moz_places_hostindex + Index moz_places_visitcount + Index moz_places_frecencyindex + Index moz_places_lastvisitdateindex + Index moz_historyvisits_placedateindex + Index moz_historyvisits_fromindex + Index moz_historyvisits_dateindex + Index moz_bookmarks_itemindex + Index moz_bookmarks_parentindex + Index moz_bookmarks_itemlastmodifiedindex + Index moz_places_url_hashindex + Index moz_places_guid_uniqueindex + Index moz_bookmarks_guid_uniqueindex + Index moz_annos_placeattributeindex + Index moz_items_annos_itemattributeindex + Index moz_keywords_placepostdata_uniqueindex + Index moz_bookmarks_dateaddedindex + Index moz_places_originidindex > Task: _refreshUI

I cannot think of anything else to check. Hopefully another support volunteer will have an idea.

Thank you for trying, have a good one.

I don't have the problem either and don't recall ever having it. This is just a wild guess. Try selecting a folder (preferably one with few contents) in "Show All Bookmarks" and then View > Sort : change the sort option. You may have a fixed sort option; if it's 'unsorted' (as is mine), I don't know whether you can change it back to that.

Thanks for replying. No, I don't sort, it wouldn't be a problem if I did--manually rearranging would just get undone. I just compared the whole about:config data from the broken ff to ff on another PC that works and there's only a few entries that mention bookmarks and the only difference is the broken one has this: "services.sync.engine.bookmarks.validation.lastTime": 1561335600," the working one doesn't have that entry at all. Don't have any idea if that means anything. There is a ton of stuff in there, including:

   "doh-rollout.balrog-migration-done": true,

Did Homer join Gandalf in some alternate reality TLOTR?

Tried exporting from the good ff and importing and that didn't work either. Guess I'll just uninstall and reinstall.

Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions ("3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions) or if hardware acceleration or userChrome.css is causing the problem.

• switch to the DEFAULT theme: "3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Themes
• do NOT click the "Refresh Firefox" button on the Safe Mode start window

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-extensions-themes-to-fix-problems

You can create a new profile as a quick test to see if your current profile is causing the problem.

See "Creating a profile":

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles

If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile

Tried safe mode, switched to default theme, tried new profile, no joy, thank you for trying. Will reinstall soon.

Update: Today it works, I did nothing new, it just started working. This is why defenestration is so often at the top of my mind when dealing with this kind of crap.

Did you reboot the computer previously as that might have cured it if you shutdown the computer yesterday ?

No I didn't but the problem has persisted across multiple reboots. I've been up for over a week at the moment. We'll see if it lasts or reverts to being obstinate again. As mentioned earlier, Firefox actually updated while I was dealing with replies here and that didn't change anything at the time.