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Like most security conscious people I use Firefox (FF) for my everyday browsing on the Internets. So when the Mozilla guys released version 3 I installed it on all my machines (2 Windows and 2 OSX platforms).

It was a bit getting used to. The underlying FF part had been changed. Bookmarks, history etc are all stored in sqlite databases. So no more flatfiles. This took me a couple of hours to figure it out, but finally I got ‘there’.

Using FF was business as usual… Apart from one very annoying bug; Opening new windows (not new tabs) results often in an empty bookmarks bar. And this is happening on Windows and OSX versions of FF.
The bookmarks are ‘there’ but not click-able. Using the right mouse button (on OSX: ctrl-mouse click) on the bookmarks bar and selecting ‘Open All in Tabs‘, FF opens every bookmark in the bar.

The only way of restoring the proper bar is the completely shutdown FF and restart it. After that it works for a certain amount of time.

The problem isn’t isolated to my environment. Just google on the issue, and you’ll find more people. There’s one suggestion I haven’t tried yet. Starting with a fresh/clean profile, but I do need my settings/passwords/bookmarks. I’m lost without those

UPDATE: I tried a new profile, and this seemed to work. After this I started to repopulate the new profile with the old settings, etc. Everything went fine until the point where I added the extensions. It seems that even old / not active extensions (SwitchProxy in my case) are still able to f*ck things up.

Mozilla released Firefox 3 during my holiday. So the first thing I had to do was upgrade v2.x to the latest version. Initially everything seemed fine…. INITIALLY…

The trouble began when I tried to add bookmarks. The new bookmark interface (it’s called Library) showed up empty. When I tried to add a bookmark, it was impossible to remove it.

“Why would you want to remove a bookmark??” Well, because every bookmark I added ended up with the URL to some ad. At first I thought I had some weird virus or trojan on my Mac. But it seemed that every Mac had the same problem.

E.g. If I added the SnipURL button to my toolbar (which is basically a javascript) it would work, but when I pressed the button, it would show a Google ad. There was also no way of removing or changing it.

Today I started digging into the /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ folder. This was the place where all settings were stored. After fooling around with importing the old bookmarks.html file I ended up with 3 times the amount of bookmarks and no way of deleting them.

It seemed that Firefox 3 uses a SQL-like database called ‘places.sqlite‘. This database imports the old bookmarks.html file upon the first launch. Possibly, that html file was corrupt (or what ever), because when I removed all bookmarking files (I did make a backup of the old bookmarks.html file!!!!) and relaunched Firefox 3, the bookmarking interface worked correctly. Now I imported the ‘old’ bookmarks.html file, and everything was back to normal (so far).

For those interested; I removed the following files under the /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ directory;

• Everything with bookmark in it’s name (make sure to backup the ‘original’ bookmarks.html). This includes backups etc.
• places.sqlite

After starting Firefox 3, you may want to import and (re)organize the old bookmarks.

Note that this scenario occured while upgrading from the latest Firefox 2 version to 3 on an Intel Mac. Other scenario’s might show similar ‘bugs’, but are not tested in any way.

Apart from this ‘minor’ issue, I’m very happy with the new browser. Speedy, less memory consumption, etc.

Now I need to figure out if bookmark-syncing is available in FF3.