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Your bookmarks aren't lost, they're just hiding.

steelgryphon.com — Some digg members have reported losing their bookmarks after installing Firefox 2. We took this report seriously and worked with some users experiencing the problem. We have steps to reproduce the issue, and have some easy steps users can take to make their bookmarks appear again, without having to restore them from a back-up.

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  • barnis, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10funny I just upgraded my home computer and had this exact problem....i finally gave up and reinstalled and it was fine...i wish i'd just read this first as i spent 15 minutes searching for a solution...hope they get that fixed soon
    • sdrawkcaB, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Mine transferred fine with the install of Firefox 2.

      That definately wasn't the case after reinstalling windows. I just go get my old bookmarks that are kept in C:Documents and SettingsOLDUSERApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfilesSOMEPROFILEbookmarks.htm and usually I just transfer the whole Mozilla folder so I keep ALL my old settings and extensions.
    • DuoPros, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I didn't have any problems, the install was flawless.
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2Who still uses local bookmarks?!?!

      http://del.icio.us

      n00bs.
    • ramiro, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I installed IE7 and it didn't "hide" my bookmarks.
      Just imagine if this happened to IE7.
      Enough said.
  • Van3ck, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I too had the same problem... So instead of relying on the transfer wizard at start up, I imported them from my bookmarks.html file. They all showed up after that.
  • Prelude76, on 10/12/2007, -15/+8My Firefox 1.5 install often gets 'stuck' after i shut down the browser, and it remains in memory. Only a Ctrl-Alt-Del - End Task truly kills it.

    I can see trying to install Firefox 2.0 while 1.5 is 'hung' in memory to be root cause of this problem.

    That's the biggest problem with these 'free' open-source projects. No programmer takes responsibility and nobody can get their arse fired over dumb mistakes like forgetting to add a 'kill task' prior to installing a new version.

    It's a shame, really. FF2.0 went thru THREE release candidates (isnt their supposed to be really just one RC build?) and nobody caught this?
    • chapium, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Its a candidate, there can be more than one. If anything it would be easier to control accountability in open source. If someone is fit to be removed from the project there are few legal consequences. There is an organization behind this project, its not just a bunch of widgets strung together with XUL.

      Non profit org != chaos and anarchy

      You cannot fire a programmer over a bug; bugs are part of programming. All programs have bugs.

      I'm not sure why people are digging you down. I wouldn't digg you up, but down? Come on people, this isn't a troll.
    • shakin, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Prelude, I'm a programmer and have worked for large corporations. I can tell you for certain that the worst programming mistakes I've seen are from corporate programmers who are forced to make poor shortcuts and terrible mistakes to meet financial objectives such as releasing software before the end of a fiscal year.

      The liberating thing for an open source programmer is that the project's objectives are usually not financial and release dates are not timed to meet artificial objectives as often. From what I've seen, and I've seen quite a bit, open source code on many projects tends to be of higher quality than the rubbish you usually find in the corporate world.
    • Prelude76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Anyone know says anything against the Holy Firefox gets dugg down, no matter if its the truth.

      I've used Firefox since it was called Firebird, way way back version 0.5 or so, and the 1.0 launch was amazing and that version rocked. but since then, with 1.5 and onwards, these 'memory leaks' that everyone at Mozilla dismisses as 'user problem', extension problems, 'its not a bug, its a cache feature', well all this is making me lose faith in the browser.

      The original plan for firefox was to keep it lean and mean, and easily extensible. Great. So why the **** are they adding more and more features that already were available as extensions before? Its becoming a dog just like Mozilla Suite is.

      And sorry, but to go thru 3 release candidates and have a major bug such as this present in the final 2.0 release, it should be embarrassing.

      go ahead, digg me down, you blind firefox zealots.
    • Majken, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1[this is a reply to Prelude76, and for some reason it's showing up in the wrong place for me, so if it's in the wrong place for anyone else, sorry about that, I have NO idea why]

      Nobody caught this because this was a bug in the installer, and it's the browser code that gets the most attention.

      If there is only supposed to be one release candidate, then what's the point of having a release candidate at all? By your logic it should just be final.

      And finally the issue is that the installer was not detecting the firefox.exe process like the software update function does, this will be fixed with no need to have the installer force a kill (which can cause data loss).

      As for your install getting stuck, you might want to get some support and fix that, it's usually caused by an extension or a plugin that's not exiting. Both of which can usually be fixed without having to give up on the extension/plugin.
  • terradyn, on 10/12/2007, -13/+5Quick! Someone check the cake the IE team sent over for trojans.
  • Cymrubeats, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3Hmm....my transition from 1.5.0.7 to 2.0 was painless (i lost two extensions, but one i can live without....so much so i can't even remember what it was :P and another I'm looking out for an update for, namely having the choice whether to restart with your last tabs open, or restart with a home page/blank page.i don't like the all or nothing choice 2.0 gives you).

    I do feel bad for those who did lose something, but now you have a fix, so w00t.
  • totorototoro, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Majken, i was one of the diggers who mentioned this-mine came back, thanks!
  • debdiego, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1The answer for bookmarking that I have used for years is www.backflip.com. You install it on your tool bar, it saves, organizes, and has search features. This has been a godsend and no matter which type of system I am on or where it is I can always access my information. Anytime, anyplace. The best, I wish it was more well known.
  • iAlex, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Did not work for me. I installed the Delicious addon and they disseapeard. Odd. :(
  • 4answer2, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3Not upgrading until more of my extensions are updated to 2.0
    • Thorpe, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2@4answer2: The public release hasn't been out for that long. Come on, give them a chance.
  • robgue, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1this would regularly happen to me with the old firefox. you'll have to load your backed up bookmarks, firefox will automatically have back ups from different days.
    • Majken, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The other disappearing bookmarks has been a pet bug of mine, which is why I jumped on this one so quickly. It's two different issues. The one you're talking about the actual files in the profile become corrupt and full of nulls. This time it's a matter of not everything updating properly in the install directory.

      More info about both issues can be found at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Lost_bookmarks
  • MaLaCoiD, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5This may be a sign that you should start using a site like del.icio.us
    • marklj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1My thoughts exactly. I haven't even checked if my old bookmarks carried over from 1.5 because i just plain never use them. Use del.icio.us for a few weeks, you will never go back to conventional bookmarks.
    • leoedin, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6but then everyone would see my porn bookmarks :o
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Hey Leo Rampen, do you use your real name on Del.icio.us too Leo Rampen? Those are some Nice farm sex links you got there Leo Rampen!

      Perhaps use a handle? ;)
    • ColonelKilkenny, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Better yet, this maybe a sign that Mozilla should start fixing Firefox.
  • deeznuts69, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I too had this problem and after being frustrated for about 10 minutes I found the fix and successfully got my bookmarks back, unfortunately, some of the extensions I was using in version 1.5 don't work on 2.0, like colorful tabs and tabmix plus... I hope they fix that soon.
  • zvezdochka, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1i use google browser sync. it works fine.
  • Nistavar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1They are hiding because I don't want anybody to find my 'secret' bookmarks.
  • thepyro, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Google bookmarks works nice.

    http://www.google.com/bookmarks/
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2888/
  • tmgneuguy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0The first time I installed Firefox 2.0 all my bookmarks disappeared. They were still in my profile folder along with the automatic backups Firefox does (nice feature that I just found out existed). I uninstalled 2.0, reinstalled 1.5.0.7 and my bookmarks were back. I re-downloaded Firefox (from a different mirror) and tried again, and it worked great.
  • BAMAToNE, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"Until the bug is fixed you can absolutely avoid this problem by closing firefox before running the installer..."

    Uh... Isn't it good practice anyway to close the program you're fixing to upgrade? I thought this was common sense to anyone smart enough to already not be using IE.
    • Majken, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The installer is supposed to detect running firefox processes and prompt you to close them. The bug is happening somewhere in this process. So far we've established that users aren't being prompted that they still have a process running. What I haven't established yet is what is closing the 1.5.0.x window, if the installer is doing it, or if the user is doing it and at what point in the installation process.
    • akinder, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4At least IE7 didn't "hide" my bookmarks. Hell I could only imagine the 84 dupe stories blasting Microsoft for that one.

      Instead, we have "Its just been a few days after their first public release, its ok".
  • TimDigg, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2does anyone have a link for firefox 2?

    I certainly don't see it anywhere
  • RyGiL, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I had this problem as well. It resulted from the fact that the FF2 installation could not close the firefox.exe process. So that's all most people need to do... to continue with my issue though..

    I looked in task manager and saw firefox.exe running and forcefully ended the task. It disappeared and the immediately came back. I also noticed that this firefox.exe only took up about 2mb of ram. I also noticed that this little firefox.exe automatically started with my Windows. I tried renaming the file and this caused my operating system to set the new exe file (in this case, 'Copy of firefox.exe') as the default browser. Then I realized it was having the same behavior. So, I realized that whatever my default browser's exe file was, this process has its name (and was legitimately running it).

    I immediately ran all the spyware and virus checks I could and looked at all the run keys and startup items in my registry. My system was perfectly clean. I don't know why but I just randomly when looking in the C:windowssystem32 directory and I noticed a file that had been modified less than 10 seconds before the current time. I opened it up in notepad++ (great program by the way), and lo and behold, it was a log of every keyboard entry I made. It had recordings up to 2 weeks ago which was about the time I did a fresh install of Windows after upgrading my motherboard. I found the exe that was updating it (lssas.exe, not to be confused with lsass.exe) and found one spot in the registry where it was listed under windows/active setup/installedcomponents and removed all of this and firefox 2 install worked fine.

    For extra fun, I spent the last 2 hours searching the keylog file to make sure there was no bank information that had been recorded and changing all the passwords to regularly visited sites it had recorded.

    The main thing that pissed me off was that 2 different virus programs didn't see it and 3 different spyware programs didn't either. Hell, my firewall didn't even have an entry for it!
  • Agares, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Tabs don't work for me. I right click and try to open a link in a new tab but nothing ever shows up. A tab pops up but no content. Can't close the blank tab either.
    • Majken, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Try the fix, that's one of the behaviors that this bug is causing.
  • truegodofwar, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1That is why I use Bookmark Backups ever since firefox lost my bookmarks the first time...

    http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=13
    • NeilM, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Sir. That extension does not work for Firefox 2.0--so, you either did not install Firefox 2.0 or you are ignorant and did not even realize it was incompatible.

      I admit, however, this is an intriguing extension. :)
  • 0KonTroL0, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I did also have this problem on one machine, another symptom was no search engines loaded.

    I made sure the process wasn't running, and reinstalled a second time and everything was fine.
  • mojaam, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Backing up the Mozilla folder in %AppData% is key to most reinstallation problems.
  • NeilM, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Firefox was a painless install for me.
  • Bevatron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This happened to me, too. I had a mini-anxiety attack while someone else reinstalled it for me. They came back, and I instantly went to delicious and started tagging all my old bookmarks. I had been meaning to get around to that for a while, anyway... guess it turned out to be a good thing.
  • DCMacHead, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Get del.icio.us and you won't have to deal with bookmarks!
  • Zlatty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1its a feature not a bug
    this whole thing totally made me anti 2.0
    1.5.0.7 is the way to be !
  • 15thPD, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I know this is completely unrelated, but I have a similar problem with IE7. Sometimes it just loses bookmarks... like, I'll add mail.google.com as a bookmark, and the bookmarks works for a while, but then later when I go to click on it, it's blank. Just a bookmark title with no actual URL. Anybody else noticed this? I'm looking for a way to repair this problem because I love IE7, besides that. I really want to drop using Firefox completely, but this bookmark problem is really chapping my ass.
  • Helicobacter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My bookmarks did get lost. I had to get an old backup to restore
  •  

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