Display Firefox's Unsorted Bookmarks in another location

Martin Brinkmann
Jul 31, 2009
Updated • Feb 14, 2015
Firefox
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Mozilla's development team introduced several new dynamic bookmark folders in Firefox 3 including the recently bookmarked, unsorted bookmarks and recent tags folders.

All but the unsorted bookmarks folder are displayed in the default Firefox bookmarks menu. The unsorted bookmarks folder on the other hand is only visible in the Firefox bookmarks manager and not in the menu.

Update: In recent versions of Firefox, unsorted bookmarks is displayed along with all other bookmark folders when you click on the bookmarks menu button. The guide can still be useful if you want to move the unsorted bookmarks folder to another location.

It is unclear why that decision has been made by the developers as it is quite uncomfortable to access the unsorted bookmarks this way.

Remember that new bookmarks that get added by clicking on the star in the Firefox address bar appear in the unsorted bookmarks folder unless you select another destination for them manually.

There are actually two solutions to improve the visibility of the unsorted bookmarks folder.

firefox unsorted bookmarks

The first option is to go into the Firefox bookmarks manager with a tap on Ctrl-Shift-b and drag and dropg the unsorted bookmarks folder to a different location. This can be either one of the toolbars or a location that is visible in the Firefox bookmarks menu.

The second option is to add a new bookmark in the location the unsorted bookmarks folder should appear and add the following line as the location:

place:folder=UNFILED_BOOKMARKS

The name of the bookmark folder can be freely selected. It may be required to restart Firefox before the folder is accessible in the web browser though so if it does not appear right away restart Firefox to make it appear.

Dragging and dropping the unsorted bookmarks folder is probably the best way of moving the unsorted bookmarks folder to another location as it is easily done and visibly right away.

Summary
Display Firefox's Unsorted Bookmarks in another location
Article Name
Display Firefox's Unsorted Bookmarks in another location
Description
The guide walks you through the steps of displaying the unsorted bookmarks folder of the Firefox web browser in a different location.
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Comments

  1. sadf said on January 6, 2011 at 8:48 am
    Reply

    dumbest feature. what were they thinking.

  2. Gary Hasman said on March 8, 2010 at 6:53 am
    Reply

    Just in case – the following procedure will remove the folder created with the above process:

    Close all open FF windows.

    Permit viewing of Hidden Files (under the Tools/Folder Options menu in Explorer)

    Now navigate to Documents and Setting/”user”/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/*.default/bookmarkbackups

    In this folder you find several backups of the FF 3.x bookmark file (places.sqlite). They have a json file extension.

    Search the latest one for the term “unfiled” (without the “”)

    Entries in this file are of the form {},{},{}

    Delete the entry containing the “unfiled” term – be sure to remove the {} and a comma (prevents to consecutive commas)

    Save the file.

    Go up one folder and delete the file “places.sqlite” (and any other places.* files if they exist)

    Restart Firefox – that Unsorted Bookmarks folder should be gone!

  3. tinwheeler said on July 31, 2009 at 3:41 pm
    Reply

    I’ve been using this system for years now. I named mine A_Unsorted so that it is at the top of my bookmark list and easy to access.

  4. Sérgio Dias said on July 31, 2009 at 12:23 pm
    Reply

    Actually there are a couple of addons that do this. They ad a button for the toolbar (I keep mine on the Bookmarks Toolbar) and a submenu on the Bookmarks Menu named “Unsorted Bookmarks”. IMO it should be a firefox 3 native feature.

    Here they are:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7269
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7286

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