If cor-el's post was addressed to me, then I can report that it had no effect. I ran all the tasks in the Places Maintenance add-on and they all came back clean. Importing bookmarks from Safari still doesn't work and doesn't report any error message.

Hi GeezJan, do you want to compare an export from Firefox 14/Windows with the file you are trying to import from Safari and see whether there are any obvious differences in the headers and/or document structure? I usually use WinMerge for text file comparison: http://winmerge.org/.

Hi jscher2000. I see obvious differences. I am attaching them as PNG files, because entering HTML into this post causes it to be processed as HTML. The first image is the Safari bookmarks exported on my Mac. The second image is the Firefox bookmarks exported on my Windows PC. (I have scrubbed the bookmarks for privacy.)

Try deleting the four lines starting with:

<DT><H3 FOLDED>Bookmarks Bar</H3>

I did a comparison export from IE8 and it does not have those four lines.

Did you try to remove the opening and closing HTML tags and maybe the FOLDED attributes in the H3 tags in the Safari export?

Well, that worked, jscher2000. Thanks!

I didn't used to have to do that, so I think something changed in Firefox, but at least I can import bookmarks again.

Hi GeezJan, yes, Firefox 14 switched from the ancient import code that apparently was very tolerant of various formats to a new HTML5-based importer with stricter requirements. I can't think of a shortcut for that cleanup, but at least it's right at the beginning of the file.