How to export live bookmarks in Firefox

Posted by Martin in Browsing, firefox  Tags: , , , , ,

9

Jun



After I realized that the Brief Firefox add-on was - at least partially - responsible for the high cpu and disk usage of Firefox every 45-60 minutes I had to find another way to read my subscribed RSS Feeds. I uninstalled the Brief add-on and did face the problem that I had to export the Firefox Live Bookmarks which are the RSS Feeds. There was unfortunately though no option in Firefox 3 to do that. I was able to export all bookmarks in html and json format.

If you cannot find a default function in Firefox you can be very sure that some add-on developer has already developed a solution. In this case it’s the OPML Support add-on which adds the function to import and export opml files in Firefox. OPML files contain the RSS Feed information and can be imported into virtually any RSS Feed reader.

firefox opml support

The two new functions are added to the Bookmark Manager which can be opened with the key combination CTRL SHIFT B. Both are available under the Import and Export menu. It takes some time to export the Live Bookmarks and Firefox will not be responsive during that time. The result is a opml file on the hard disk that can be imported into RSS Feed readers like Google Reader.


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6 Users Commented In This Post

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Mike S says:

I tried using the FF3 OPML support addon but after waiting for 2 or 3 minutes with no apparent activity (no output file had been created according to the windows file explorer) I closed the addon dialog which also closed FF.

I have several dozen live bookmarks I want to remove from FF and load into Opera or some other RSS reader because when I load FF it is unresponsive and hogs the cpu for over 30 seconds, (and I have a fast dual core system).

At this point I’m wondering how long I should wait for FF to complete the live bookmark export… 5 minutes? If you don’t mind my asking… how many live RSS bookmarks did you have, how fast is your system, and how long did it take for the export operation to be completed?

Thanks,
Mike

Martin says:

Mike I really cannot remember how long I waited but it was more than just 2-3 minutes. My system uses a brand new Wolfdale cpu and 4 gigs of RAM. I had 160 Live Bookmarks at that time.

Mike S says:

Thanks for the quick reply and the info, I’ll try again and wait longer. Nice system you’ve got there!

Mike S says:

I tried again, waited 23 minutes, processor at 50%, no file. Restarted FF, processor at 1% so I guess it was doing something, I’ll try again when I can let it sit for an hour or more, I’ll let you know what happens.

Mike S says:

Martin, after about half an hour the file was written, worked perfectly. Thanks for your post, I would have given up otherwise. For everyone else out there, if you’re patient this addon works great.

Tarah W says:

Thanks for the information! I didn’t want to spend hours doing it by hand.

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