Check For Dead Bookmarks in Firefox 3

Many applications that were able to check the boomarks in previous versions of Firefox are no longer working with the latest Firefox 3 because of the changes that have been made to the way those bookmarks are stored. Firefox 2 and previous versions did store the bookmarks in a file called bookmarks.html while Firefox 3 stores them in a database file called places.sqlite in the Firefox profile folder.

There is however an easy way to check all bookmarks of Firefox 3. The software AM Deadlink can still be used to check the bookmarks with a slightly more complex procedure. Bookmarks can still be exported as bookmarks.html in Firefox 3 and then loaded into AM Deadlink. The other difference is that the bookmarks have to be imported again into Firefox without ending up with duplicate bookmarks.

Bookmarks can be exported in Firefox 3 by pressing CTRL SHIFT B, clicking on the Import and Backup link on top of the Firefox bookmark manager and selecting Export HTML.

This file can then be loaded into AM Deadlinks and checked for dead bookmarks. The dead bookmarks can be removed and the file saved again so that the new bookmarks.html file contains only valid links.

If you would import that file into Firefox 3 again you would end up with lots of duplicate bookmarks. You need to delete the old bookmarks in Firefox 3 before importing the checked bookmarks. I strongly suggest to backup the places.sqlite file before you start removing any bookmarks though for safety reasons.