Greetings. I run the latest Firefox on Win7/64 with only three add-ons (Flash Video Downloader, Ghostery, Skype). Of these, only Ghostery really matters to me. If there i… (閱讀更多)
Greetings. I run the latest Firefox on Win7/64 with only three add-ons (Flash Video Downloader, Ghostery, Skype). Of these, only Ghostery really matters to me. If there is any real evidence that any of these is causing my problem (please see below), then I'll be happy to discard it/them and prove you right.
Please forgive my detailing my environment, but I've learned the hard way that I'll be slammed if I don't. The next few paragraphs describe my context. Please bear with me.
My PC is not state-of-the-art but still hums: Dell XPS 8300 heavily modified, i7-2600@3.4GHz, 16GB RAM, Crucial 960GB SSD, WD 3TB Black user data, AMD Radeon R9 200, User Experience 7.6. Yes, I do run Win10, but only under VMware Workstation v12 Pro. Let's not go there. Thank you.
I learned years ago to relocate my Mozilla FF/TB profiles to my user data drive and back them up daily. Yes, I have recreated my FF environment more than once by creating a new FF profile - but always based upon a previous JSON file. Only FF settings and bookmarks matter to me. I can recreate settings in 10 seconds. The only real issue is bookmarks. Perhaps there is a more substantive recovery mechanism that you can suggest? Further, I manually back up bookmarks daily (both JSON and HTML). Yes, I know how to Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > Import and Backup > {Backup...,Restore,Import Bookmarks from HTML...,Export Bookmarks to HTML...}. I use these features SEVERAL times per day. The problem, of course, is granularity: these features are "all or nothing". The issue lies below.
Over the years, I've built up over 6,000 bookmarks in ~300 top-level folders with decent distribution across lower-level folders. I have few sub-trees with more than 50 bookmarks in a leaf folder. Yes, I know something about unbalanced tree structures. FWIW, It's clear that I'm beginning to tax the FF bookmark system: about a year ago, despite all apps on SSD, launching FF and rendering the left pane of top-level bookmark folders has gone from virtually instantaneous (< 250ms) to 3-5 seconds. Perhaps a red flag?
On average, I add 25-100 bookmarks daily: mostly (in these trying days of political madness :-) somewhere in a 3-tier tree (politics > 2016 Presidential campaign > {Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, SCOTUS, whatever}... but always a dozen or so in other established folders (health, computing, photography, whatever).
So... FINALLY (don't you hate that adverb in headlines?) to my issue. I'll try to save a bookmark to some (sub-)folder... only to see that it's missing. That (sub-)folder is never the last - even (N-)penultimate - that I might have accessed that day. Today, for example, when finally I've had enough and decided to appeal to you experts, I had saved several DOZEN bookmarks in politics/computing/Tesla/whatever and then tried to save another in "health"... only to discover that it... was. not. there.
I won't try to detail the deficient recovery process that one must undertake in these situations. I guess I would be - grudgingly - willing to search back in my daily JSON/HTML backups to find that last extant instance of "health" (in this case)... but JSON files - as far as I am aware - do not appear to be easily decomposable into (folders and folders of folders of) bookmarks. Of course, I can open the full bookmarks HTML backup file in MS Word... but toward what end? Is there some simple trick - of which I am unaware - whereby I could clip an HTML segment of (folders and folders of folders of) bookmarks and re-insert it into my current Firefox bookmark structure?
So. Here is my hierarchy of needs:
1. FF bookmark manager should just work: not lose (folders of) bookmarks. Well, no doubt, of course, the crowd will slam me that it's all my fault. OK. If so, how? I am willing to learn better how to use Mozilla Firebox bookmarks. But how?
2. Failing that, how can I clip a now-missing bookmark folder (quite likely with a significant bookmark folder tree beneath) from yesterday's JSON/HTML files and re-import it to repair today's data base?
3. Failing that, what are my options? Frankly, I'm now looking at switching browsers, using Evernote/Word/Notepad/bookmarkmanagers to manage bookmarks, etc. Early research suggests greatly reduced reliability and user experience in all of those scenarios.
Thank you for your patience. I am a retired software engineer (but never at the web level) and would be happy to participate in whatever debugging/logging/alternative trial(s) that might resolve this situation. Frankly, I've reached the point where I can no longer trust Firefox!
Best regards,
...milo47