Share Bookmarks between IE and Firefox

Martin Brinkmann
Apr 12, 2007
Updated • Jun 7, 2013
Firefox
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10

Some users are switching between Firefox and Internet Explorer on their computer depending on the task at hand. It is for instance essential for webmasters to check their websites in the most commonly used web browsers.

To make this more comfortable, an option to share bookmarks between the two browsers would come a long way to make this more comfortable.

This can be done easily with the Firefox extension Plain old Favorites which adds the favorites from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The favorites menu is placed next to the bookmarks menu in the browser.

Whenever a new bookmark is added to Internet Explorer it appears in Firefox as well. You can also add every website that you visit in Firefox to the favorites by adding that website to the new favorites menu instead of the bookmarks menu. We can improve this method further by tweaking several settings.

First of, it does not make much sense to use a bookmarks and a favorites menu in Firefox. We can merge the bookmarks with the favorites first and then use simple css code to remove the bookmarks menu from Firefox. To do this we have to export the bookmarks from Firefox using the exports function in the bookmarks manager.

This saves a file bookmarks.html to your desktop. Open the Internet Explorer in the next step and click on File > Import and Export and choose to import favorites. Browse to and select the bookmarks.html file that has been saved in Firefox. Select a folder where you want to place the bookmarks in and complete the operation.

internet explorer favorites

If you go back to Firefox you see that all the bookmarks are available in the Favorites menu as well.

To hide the Bookmarks menu you have to find the file userChrome.css. You can find it in your Firefox profile folder in the  chrome directory. The easiest way to get there is to load about:support in Firefox and click on the show folder button on the page that opens up.

If the userChrome.css file does not exist create it and add the following line to it:

#bookmarks-menu {display:none !important;}

This should hide the bookmarks menu after the next restart. If you remove that line again the bookmarks menu will become visible again.

One last thing that we have to deal with is that sites still get added to the bookmarks if you press the shortcut CTRL + D. We want to change that to add them to the Favorites with that command. To do that we need another extension called Keyconfig which can do this easily.

Start the extension from the Tools menu. Now remove the old entries Bookmark all Tabs and Bookmark this Page. After that add a new key that you call Favorites for example. Enter the following line in the Code field:

gPofUI.openAddToFavoritesDialog();

Last thing that needs to be done is to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. We want to add CTRL + D obviously and need to select our new named key in the main window of keyconfig and click in the white empty field below the table of keys. Press CTRL and D afterwards and that entry should appear as the new shortcut to add entries to our Favorites.

Update: The Firefox extension PlainOldFavorites is no longer compatible with recent versions of the web browser.

You can use an add-on like Xmarks Sync instead to synchronize bookmarks across web browsers. The extension supports Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.

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Comments

  1. r k sharma said on February 15, 2010 at 7:58 am
    Reply

    share it…..

  2. Awktane said on October 20, 2009 at 3:44 am
    Reply

    Further on what I said above there is an addon that will remove it too called Menu Editor. This addon will allow you to also remove the context menu “Add to bookmarks” entries easily.

  3. Awktane said on October 20, 2009 at 3:31 am
    Reply

    Bringing to life an ancient thread but this still works with firefox 3.5 with one modification. The entry added to your file should be

    #bookmarksMenu {display:none !important;}

  4. John said on September 9, 2008 at 4:50 pm
    Reply

    Any thoughts on sharing with Google Chrome as well now? Also, hiding the Bookmarks Menu no longer works in the newest version of Firefox!

  5. Vince said on April 26, 2007 at 4:43 am
    Reply

    I had the same problem as JMH16 re removing bookmarks until I discovered there are several chrom directories, the one that works is:

    is in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[Profile Name]\chrome\

    also, there is an example file there (and a copy with the carriage returns displaying properly here C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\profile\chrome). These say to put the namespace line in. I have pasted my complete working file below for posterity:

    /*
    * Edit this file and copy it as userChrome.css into your
    * profile-directory/chrome/
    * (which is in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[Profile Name]\chrome\)
    */

    /*
    * This file can be used to customize the look of Mozilla’s user interface
    * You should consider using !important on rules which you want to
    * override default settings.
    */

    /*
    * Do not remove the @namespace line — it’s required for correct functioning
    */

    /*
    set default namespace to XUL
    */

    @namespace url(“http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul”);

    #bookmarks-menu {display:none !important;}

    /*
    * Some possible accessibility enhancements:
    */
    /*
    * Make all the default font sizes 20 pt:
    *
    * * {
    * font-size: 20pt !important
    * }
    */
    /*
    * Make menu items in particular 15 pt instead of the default size:
    *
    * menupopup > * {
    * font-size: 15pt !important
    * }
    */
    /*
    * Give the Location (URL) Bar a fixed-width font
    *
    * #urlbar {
    * font-family: monospace !important;
    * }
    */

    /*
    * Eliminate the throbber and its annoying movement:
    *
    * #throbber-box {
    * display: none !important;
    * }
    */

    /*
    * For more examples see http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html
    */

  6. Vince said on April 24, 2007 at 10:27 am
    Reply

    hah hah, ok – where I used html, guess what. so, what that said is, trying inserting spaces to get them to display: & became & a m p ; and ‘ became & # 3 9 ;

  7. Vince said on April 24, 2007 at 10:24 am
    Reply

    There is a minor complication in that ie6 exports favorites to Firefox 2 but Firefox doesn’t reciprocate. The main issue was the 100+ I used an & symbol, which got converted to & and there was also a bunch of ‘ which became ' (from memory). This was both in the names themselves and the text items which were typically site generated.

    It was easy enough to fix this, just opened the file in an html editor (I used Front Page) and very soon the replace all tool fixed it.

    There were a few favorites created that had ridiculously long strings nothing to do with what I put there, just deleted these!

  8. nfiken said on April 20, 2007 at 11:42 pm
    Reply

    what about the bookmarktoolbar or whatever it’s called, the one showing all the bookmarks just above the page I guess that one won’t work?

  9. JMH16 said on April 20, 2007 at 5:51 am
    Reply

    for some reason can’t remove Bookmarks from the menu. any more details about the userChrome.css file
    maybe a screenshot of what the exact text would look like??

  10. gnome said on April 13, 2007 at 12:19 pm
    Reply

    Very handy!

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