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:
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
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
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
> 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