Importing del.icio.us bookmarks into Firefox 3

I’ve been pretty impressed with Firefox 3, the new version of the browser launched by Mozilla on June 17. It feels a lot snappier on OSX (it no longer lags behind Safari) and the new implementation of the address bar is very usable. My favourite plugins were also immediately available (despite a few teething problems with the update system). So I finally took the plunge and switched my default browser to Firefox instead of Safari.

One of the new features I was glad to see was the ability to add tags to bookmarks. This is a much better way to organise bookmarks than a folder structure and it made me wonder about importing all my del.icio.us bookmarks into Firefox. Although the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox 3 is actually very good, I thought it might be nice to be able to use the native browser system for adding new ones. (Sadly you can’t use both at the same time at the moment, because installing the del.icio.us extension seems to cripple the Firefox ‘add bookmark’ function).

Annoyingly it turns out that, although you can export your bookmarks from del.icio.us with tags, importing them into Firefox strips off all the tag information. After some discussion on the Mozilla forum, someone came up with a ruby script for converting del.icio.us bookmarks into the required Firefox compatible format (including tags). And now my friend Zhang Xue from e-accent has helped me create a little online tool for doing the conversion, based on that original ruby script. Check it out at:

http://delicious.e-accent.com

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Posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 4:51 pm and filed under Code, Projects. You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

12 Comments

  1. Actually, importing hundreds of bookmarks into Firefox organised by tags shows up a weakness in its bookmark management flow. Although the tags are all available, you can’t easily access them from the ‘Bookmarks’ link; instead you have to click ‘Organise bookmarks’ to open a separate window. And by the same token, if you have a lot of tagged bookmarks, they all appear in a long flat list in the root folder. What the browser needs is the option to ’sort by tag’ in the bookmark list, instead of sorting by folder. Hopefully they’ll add that soon. For now, ‘power bookmarkers’ may be better off sticking with the delicious plugin.

    admin at 5:01 pm on 27 Jun 08

  2. Yes, I find the same problem. It will not be that useful to access bookmarks by tags only through “Organize bookmarks”.

    Snow at 4:33 am on 28 Jun 08

  3. We got a write-up on Lifehacker though: http://lifehacker.com/397303/import-your-delicious-bookmarks-and-tags-to-firefox-3

    admin at 11:12 am on 30 Jun 08

  4. > It will not be that useful to access bookmarks by tags only through “Organize bookmarks”.

    The TagSifter extension can show you a tag cloud of the tags you’ve used in your Firefox 3 bookmarks in the sidebar. It isn’t ideal but it’s a whole lot better than the “Organize bookmarks” window…

    Peter at 4:31 am on 13 Jul 08

  5. I just tried this but it just says errors reported. Does it work with Firefox 3.1?

    Olly Stedall at 10:09 pm on 1 Jan 09

  6. @Olly: I haven’t tried it with FF 3.1 beta – probably should do that when I get a moment. Did you try the same thing in 3.0.5?

    admin at 1:56 pm on 5 Jan 09

  7. For importing my del.icio.us bookmarks i used a bookmark manager. With Advanced URL Catalog i succesfully imported my delicious bookmarks into AUC and then exported in Firefox.

    John at 8:27 pm on 21 Jan 09

  8. I’m in desperate need of this tool but can’t get it to work. I follow all the instructions, but the “merged” .json it gives me just contains the contents of the original .json plus an empty Imported Delicious Bookmarks folder. None of the bookmarks from the exported Delicious .html file are added.

    Any chance you could fix this?

    Thanks!

    Magritte at 9:16 pm on 28 Oct 09

  9. I’m running into exactly the same problem as Magritte — maybe it’s a FF version issue? I’m running FF 3.5.4, myself, and there maybe something different about the JSON file it uses.

    LairBob at 1:20 pm on 30 Oct 09

  10. Hi Magritte and LairBob

    Really sorry but I don’t think I can help. The tool obviously needs ongoing work but we’re just too busy to put in the time required. If there is still a fair amount of demand for it out there, then I guess there are a couple of options. One is for us to start charging something per conversion – maybe $5 say – so we can put some programmer time into getting the tool running smoothly. Or the other is to hand the source code over to someone else so it can continue as an open source project.

    Let me know if you have any views on this.

    Ben Hayes at 1:29 pm on 30 Oct 09

  11. Just found your reply… I’d be happy to pay $5 for the conversion since it just has to be done once. I don’t know if you’ll get enough takers though. Maybe… since it’s a reasonable price and with Weave progressing and Delicious’s move to require Yahoo login there may be renewed interest.

    Otherwise, there is a bug on Mozillazine suggesting support of importing tagged HTML bookmarks. Perhaps you could offer the source to anyone interested in tackling the bug to expedite it so maybe it could be included in ver 3.6…

    Magritte at 7:35 pm on 4 Dec 09

  12. According to the original thread at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=659182&start=30, the original coder Watanabe has put up an alternative site at http://delicious-to-firefox3.heroku.com/. You might want to try that. Or contact him if it doesn’t work – he might be willing to put his code on Github or somewhere similar. I don’t think we can post our code on there because it is based on his, so we’d need to ask him.

    Ben Hayes at 3:13 pm on 9 Dec 09

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