How to access Firefox 3 bookmarks from the command line?

[ace007]

The solution is here...

enter "about:config" in firefix 3.0 address bar. Find the settings "browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML" double click it to change the boolean entry to "true". Now when you shut down Firefox a new bookmarks.html with your updated bookmarks will be created in your firefox profile folder.

[Yuzem]

Thanks that works.

I would still prefer to be able to access the bookmarks without having to shutdown firefox or ask the user to set a custom option.
That is from the point of view of someone making an application that needs to access the firefox bookmarks.

[englandschorsch]

Thanks that works.

I would still prefer to be able to access the bookmarks without having to shutdown firefox or ask the user to set a custom option.
That is from the point of view of someone making an application that needs to access the firefox bookmarks.

I totally agree. I want to write a krunner plugin under KDE 4 that tries to match firefox bookmarks, because so far only konqueror bookmarks are supported.
Being able to access firefox bookmarks through sqlite would be very helpful.

[cszikszoy]

I totally agree. I want to write a krunner plugin under KDE 4 that tries to match firefox bookmarks, because so far only konqueror bookmarks are supported.
Being able to access firefox bookmarks through sqlite would be very helpful.

I'm trying to write a GNOME Do plugin that better handles firefox's bookmarks. Right now we just parse the JSON files in the profile directory, but getting access to places.sqlite would be ideal.

I've also thought about writing a firefox extension that would expose bookmark data to dbus.

[Can+~]

Whoa, this post is old.

Instead of asking the user to shutdown firefox, why don't you wait that the user closes it, then, silently open the sqlite file, copy the bookmarks and update the gnome-do/krunner db?

[englandschorsch]

Whoa, this post is old.

That's what I thought. ^^

Instead of asking the user to shutdown firefox, why don't you wait that the user closes it, then, silently open the sqlite file, copy the bookmarks and update the gnome-do/krunner db?

Yeah, probably. I'm new to this whole Linux world, so I don't know yet, how krunner really works and whether it has a db at all. I guess it must, because otherwise it wouldn't be so fast.

[cszikszoy]

Whoa, this post is old.

Instead of asking the user to shutdown firefox, why don't you wait that the user closes it, then, silently open the sqlite file, copy the bookmarks and update the gnome-do/krunner db?

That would definitely work, although it's non-ideal. Do works by creating an "Item Source", in this case, firefox bookmarks are the items. I would have to create a local (to gnome-do) cache of the bookmarks, and if the user added a new bookmark in firefox these would be out of sync until they restarted firefox.

I've also thought about just making a copy of places.sqlite, reading that, then deleting it, but that db is pretty big (mine is 10 MB with 4-5 bookmarks) and IO gets expensive...

[Can+~]

That would definitely work, although it's non-ideal. Do works by creating an "Item Source", in this case, firefox bookmarks are the items. I would have to create a local (to gnome-do) cache of the bookmarks, and if the user added a new bookmark in firefox these would be out of sync until they restarted firefox.

I've also thought about just making a copy of places.sqlite, reading that, then deleting it, but that db is pretty big (mine is 10 MB with 4-5 bookmarks) and IO gets expensive...

It not only stores bookmarks, but also history. Mine is 148 KB with 50+ bookmarks but 1 week of history.