November 09, 2004

Curious George - Importing Bookmarks from Safari to Firefox The title says it all. I am thinking of switching over to Firefox from Safari, but am having trouble importing my bookmarks and cookies. Apparently it will do it automatically from Explorer and an older version of Firefox, but not from Safari. Any suggestions?
posted by squidranch 19 years ago
  • Cookies, maybe not. But surely you can export to an html file (user something like this), and then import in Firefox using the bookmark manager's File -> import -> from file feature.
  • s/user/using/
  • A search of VersionTracker gives you this piece of software for exporting Safari bookmarks. It says something about Firefox 0.9, so I'd look for an update Any Day Now.
  • I stopped using bookmarks when I recently started using del.icio.us. Now I have my del.icio.us page load as my default page on all my browsers, and I don't have to worry about whether that link I kinda sorta remember was bookmarked on my desktop, laptop or work machine. Plus the site makes it very easy to follow memes or find usefull tools simply by seeing what others are linking to, so I can also subscribe to other's pages and check occasionally to see what is in my inbox.
  • I know that was not technically on-topic, but as someone who got sick of moving bookmarks between machines and browsers I think it is an alternative folks should consider.
  • Got it done. Thanks all.
  • Sort of on-topic: I've been wanting to move to Firefox for a while (from Safari), mostly because the cool kids are doing it, and what's stopped me is not the non-obvious transfer of bookmarks but the simple speed differential. Safari still performs significantly better. Is this just me?
  • Firefox has an extension called "Bookmarks Syncroniser" . I've been using it for a while and it's very good. It helps to have your own server with FTP or HTTP. I can now get my bookmarks on any firefox, on any machine, anywhere there is intarweb. Also, becuase it uses the inbuilt Bookmarks system, bookmarking a new page is as easy as doing that. It's still beta, so Firefox1.0 will be without for a few days. There is also an extension that will "integrate your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser bookmarks" Foxylicious; https://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=342&vid=1048 Safari appears to be faster because Apple wrote it , wrote the OS. They would be able to put in "enhancements" that other dev's would'nt know about because of 'closed code'. Gots to lurve open source software.
  • Bit of useless trivia, jacbo: Safari's primary author is Dave Hyatt, who, before he left to work for Apple, started (with Blake Ross) the experimental branch of Mozilla which was to become Firefox... (then called Phoenix. And for a while, known as Mozilla Firebird.) Kinda neat how two very excellent browsers have a common thread between them... :) He's also credited with bringing tabbed browsing to Mozilla, Camino (another nice Mac OS X browser which he also worked on,) and Firefox... pretty cool dude.
  • Jacbo, I had the same objection, until I tried the Firefox optimization tips here. Now Firefox runs as well as Safari, or even slightly better, on my 733mhz G4 Mac. By the way, Jacbo, I think your login name is anagramattically great.
  • Oops, sorry--it was rustcellar for whom the optimization tips were meant.