Indexing Firefox 3.0 Bookmarks with Quicksilver
Monday, July 7, 2008 by Chris Lesinski If you're a Quicksilver user, you may have noticed that an upgrade to Firefox 3.0 will screw up your bookmark indexing. Ordinarily, Quicksilver should keep track of all of your bookmarks even when you make them through Firefox. In the same way that the new version of Firefox "predicts" what URL you're typing in, Quicksilver would do the same. So, the work flow is: invoke Quicksilver, start typing in your bookmark, press enter -- and Quicksilver would automatically launch your browser and the URL you wanted. There's also more complicated stuff you can do with quick web searches and bookmarks in Firefox.
Since Firefox 3.0 has a funky new Quicksilver-esque navigation bar, bookmarks are stored in a different place and in a different language. You have to ask Firefox 3.0 to export in the Firefox 2.0 style for Quicksilver to be effective.
The hack
- In the navigation bar, type in
about:config. And "void your warrany" -- that's a joke from the Mozilla folks. - Start typing in
browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTMLuntil you find it. This is the setting for the Firefox-2.0-style bookmark saving. - Toggle this setting to "true" by double-clicking or left clicking and selecting "Toggle."
After that tweak, Firefox will export the bookmarks to bookmarks.html every time you close it. From there, Quicksilver will see the bookmarks or quicksearches you've been saving.
Don't use Quicksilver? Check out our introduction to Quicksilver for students.
Reader Comments (15)
excellent post, Chris. this has been bugging me for a bit now. gracias.
This just made my day :)
Dude, thanks so much! This was driving me crazy. I attempted to read another article about this, and I wanted to die it was so confusing (okay... a bit of sarcasm). This was simple, and it worked. Woohoo!
www.Greg-Loesch.com
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[...] - bookmarked by 4 members originally found by KiMarquis on July 18, 2008 Indexing Firefox 3.0 Bookmarks with Quicksilver http://www.hackcollege.com/2008/07/07/indexing-firefox-30-bookmarks-with-quicksilver/ - bookmarked [...]
Thanks for the tip, but quicksilver now opens my firefox bookmarks in safari. Is it possible for it to recognize which application the bookmark comes from?
Ryan- Make sure that Firefox is set as your default browser.
Do this by opening Safari. Then go to Preferences and select General. There should be an option called "Set default browser" (something like that). Change it from Safari to Firefox, and that should fix it.
[...] to application launchers like Quicksilver and Launchy for quick launching from the desktop. Indexing Firefox 3.0 Bookmarks with Quicksilver [...]
THANKS! I'm back in love with Quicksilver again!
[...] (Mac) nebegali j? ?traukti ? savo paiešk?. Jei norite gr?žinti š? funkcionalum?, „about:config“ tinklalapyje pakeiskite eksportavimo nuostat? (žr. pav) ? „true“. Tuo pa?iu tur?site ir atsargin? žym? kopij?. [...]
[...] 3 tidak menyimpan bookmark kedalam format HTML biasa, tidak seperti Firefox 2. Hack ini memungkinkan supaya Quicksilver bisa membaca bookmark Firefox 3. [...]
[...] Indexing Firefox 3.0 Bookmarks with Quicksilver [HackCollege] [...]
[...] Via | HackCollege [...]
[...] Indexing Firefox 3.0 Bookmarks with Quicksilver | HackCollege (tags: firefox bookmarks tips) [...]
I love your thoughts! I normally don\'t even bother to leave comments, but I wanted to let you know that you hit the nail on the head!
I cannot for the life of me figure out why this doesn't work for me. If anybody had another tip to get it going, please, let me know.