Check Places is the first Firefox 3 extension that can check all Firefox 3 bookmarks for duplications and invalid references aka dead pages. The experimental add-on can be downloaded right from the Mozilla website after logging in as a user. The new Check Places entry will be added by the Firefox add-on to the bookmarks menu. A click on that link will open a new window that the user can use to configure the scan behavior.

It is possible to scan all bookmarks or only selected folders. Exclusions can be made so that some bookmarks or folders will not be scanned in the process. The scan itself can check if the pages that the bookmarks point to exist and if it is stored more than once in the bookmarks.

The scan does not take long, a few minutes for a few hundreds bookmarks. The results are displayed in a tabbed interface detailing the bookmarks that have returned a page not found error and those that have been recognized as duplicates.

Each Firefox bookmark can be opened and checked individually. The extension will list the return status of the page, e.g. 404 page not found or 500 Internal server error to aid the user in his decision. A simple timeout for example usually means that the page could be back up later while a 404 usually hints at a more severe problem.

Selected bookmarks or all can be deleted in the end to clean the Firefox bookmarks from duplicates and invalid entries. Check Places is a great Firefox 3 extension, must have for every Firefox user that has more than a handful of bookmarks and indispensable for users with hundreds and more.

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The best way to start the analysis of the problem was to create a backup of the Firefox 3 bookmarks to be on the save side. A quick search on the Internet suggested to delete the files places.sqlite and places.sqlite-journal which contained the bookmark information. Deleting them would force Firefox to rebuild the bookmarks from the last backup. The best option is to simply move them from the profile folder into another folder for safety purposes.

Firefox did recreated both files but it did not solve the problem. It was still not possible to delete bookmarks permanently. Next option was to remove both the files and the bookmark backups so that Firefox could not recreate the bookmarks and would have to start with a new blank bookmarks file.

This includes deleting or moving the folder bookmarkbackups and the bookmarks.xxx files in the Firefox profile folder.

A restart of Firefox revealed that all bookmarks were finally gone. It was also possible to delete and move the default bookmarks in Firefox. The last step was to import the bookmarks from the backup that was created at the beginning and move them into their correct places again.

A test to delete and move those imported bookmarks was positive and solved the issue of being not able to delete Firefox 3 bookmarks.

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So what’s possible with this technique besides the three default dynamic bookmark folders? Users could display all bookmarks that are tagged with a specific tag, display the latest ten pages that they visited on a specific domain or to list the least visited bookmarks. Many additional possibilities exist and it is just a matter of defining the database query correctly to achieve them.

The basics first. Database queries are added as normal bookmarks and placed in the location field instead of the usual url. The name can be selected freely. Database queries use the place:query syntax. Let’s take a look at an example:

The above query is “place:queryType=0&sort=8&maxResults=10″ uses the filters queryType, sort and maxResults.

queryType=0 will return an URI for each result
sort=8 will sort the bookmarks by visit count
maxResults=10 limits the results to ten bookmarks.

The guys at the Mozillazine forum did a good job of listing the relevant queries and it would be redundant to simply copy and paste their work here. Just head over to the forum and take a look at the queries. If you want to have a specific query and cannot get it to work let us know in the comments and we try to build it for you.

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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.

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The problem that arises is that the parameter that worked in Firefox 2 to change the location of the bookmarks does not work in Firefox 3 anymore. Currently there is only one solution to move the bookmarks in Firefox 3 to another folder. Before I explain how this is done I would like to point out why someone would want to move the bookmarks to another folder.

One reason is synchronization. Placing them on a network drive for instance ensures that another computer can also access those bookmarks. Another reason might be security, bookmarks can obviously be stored on an encrypted hard disk so that no one could access them unless the encrypted hard disk is mounted. It would also make sense to place them in a location so that different profiles (on the same computer) can access the same bookmarks.

The only viable way of moving the bookmarks in Firefox 3 is by using symbolic links. Symbolic links are supported under Linux and Windows NTFS drives. I’m not sure about Macintosh though. A symbolic link basically is a forwarded link that tells the operating system to look at another place for the file.

The command for Linux is ln -s target_filename symlink_filename while Windows users could use the Junction tool by Sysinternals to achieve the same results.

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