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Comment by derleth | Hacker News Reader

My main gripe about Mozilla (Firefox, really) bookmarks is how to merge two bookmark files with tags attached.

Let me make that clearer, since apparently absolutely nobody at Mozilla can understand the italicized portion: I have two files full of tagged bookmarks. I want to have one file of tagged bookmarks. The tags from both original files must be preserved. If a bookmark is tagged in either of the original files, it must be tagged the same way in the new file.

Involving third-party hardware in this is not an option. I like my privacy.

It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me.

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It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me.

I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript.

(I fear you may be very much into the Realm of the Edge Case.)

> I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript.

Javascript isn't the hard part here; it's trying to figure out how to extract anything like what I need from the places.sqlite databases that hold all the relevant data.

If you trust the cloud Mozilla's client side encrypted sync service will do this.

If you want simple and dirty.

1. Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine

2. Pick your favorite scripting language

3. merge the two json backup files using your script

Import the resulting json file in a clean Firefox profile.

> Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine

I've tried this. The tags are not in the JSON dumps. The Mozilla people apparently believe that backing up your bookmarks means to back up everything except the tags.

A corollary: The only way to actually back up your bookmarks is to back up the places.sqlite file. Nothing else contains all the relevant data.

Wow. Okay, thanks for the information. Is there an open bug for this already? :(

Apparently, I was wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4716258

Tags are in the bookmark backup JSON.(Storing tags was one of the primary reasons for moving from bookmarks.html.) Search for "root": "tagsFolder" anything that is a parent of that is a tag.

Hey, thanks. Looking at a pretty-printed JSON file with that little piece of info cleared it up for me.

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