Wednesday 18 May 2016

Converting Firefox Bookmarks

So, I recently bought a Macbook. Windows PC had died a horrible death involving Windows 10.

I have my backup - but I no longer want to use Firefox (I have Chrome, I have Safari... that'll do). I need to convert Firefox bookmarks into something useful. Normally, you'd export as "bookmarks.html" and have at it. Unfortunately I don't have the running system to export from.

Firefox has some loopy compressed json backup format - I couldn't read that based on 5 minutes googling. I used "places.sqlite" from the profile directory instead.

Here is a bit of perl which will do a very rudimentary job of converting the mozilla sqlite database into something approaching bookmarks.html. I hope somebody finds it useful, and maybe it saves them installing Firefox just for a conversion.