116712 - IE Favorites is empty (Imported IE Favorites is a useless bookmark) when there are no Favorites

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P3)

Description

[Skewer]

Procedure: Have no Favorites in IE.

Expected: Imported IE Favorites is a folder containing a grayed-out "(Empty)" item.

Actual: Imported IE Favorites is a bookmark that does absolutely nothing.

Build: 2001122208 WinXP

Comment 1

[Peter Trudelle]

mass reassign of pchen bookmark bugs to ben

Comment 2

[Andrew Hagen]

Shouldn't this be resolved as a duplicate of bug 22642? 

All you need to do is go to Bookmark Manager and "delete" Imported IE favorites. 

Comment 3

[Skewer]

No. This is about behavior of the IE favorites item, not ability to remove it.
Please read more carefully.

Comment 4

[Tony Tovar]

reporter, Are you sure this wasn't a temporary problem with newly imported IE
Favorites?

(Of course, I don't know how to tell you to re-import them.  I think if you use
Bookmark Manager to delete the empty link, then Mozilla may automatically
reimport IE Favorites; see bug 127756 )

Comment 5

[Skewer]

atovar: Do you get different results with my test procedure? If not, it's safe
to say this behavior is consistent.

Comment 6

[Tony Tovar]

What test procedure?  All you said in your initial post was that your IE didn't
have any bookmarks, and so you didn't expect to see "IE Favorites" listed in
Mozilla's imported bookmarks.  

Since I'm having problems with importing IE Favorites AT ALL, I'm not in a
position to test/confirm this, but it sounds like the expected behaviour; the
"imported" IE Favorites folder is supposed to be a live link. 

So, don't you think this should either be WONTFIX? Or, at most, make it an RFE,
e.g. "[RFE] if IE Favorites blank, hide import folder in Mozilla bookmarks"

Comment 7

[Skewer]

Tony: Please pay attention. The problem is that instead of an "(Empty)" item,
like you might see in any other bookmark folder, a tiny square is being rendered
when IE favorites is empty.

If you aren't sure what this bug is about, don't tell people to WONTFIX it.

Comment 8

[Tony Tovar]

Now that I've got my Imported IE Favorites working again, I was able to
(re)confirm this bug with build 2002-04-29 branch on WinNT.  Sorry I didn't
understand the problem initially!

Reporter, I still think this could be set WONTFIX.  Currently, it's just a
cosmetic bug (severity=trivial?) that can be remedied by deleting the offending
folder...

Comment 9

[Skewer]

I'll make the severity change, since this is the least of things I want fixed in
Mozilla. But it should never be WONTFIXed just because nobody wants to fix it.

Comment 10

[Tony Tovar]

Good point.  If only I was a programmer...

Comment 11

[Babs]

Have the same error without warning or error message. No way I can browse to IE
favorites to import (would be a nice feature to add ?). Installed yesterday 1.2
version from ftp site (Windows XP). Have my Mozilla in C:\Program files... and
my NT profile, so IE favorites, on D:\Documents and settings... (2 partitions on
the same drive).

Babs

Comment 12

[David]

I'm seeing the same behaviour as noted by Skewer - small box where IE links
should be. From a technical standpoint I agree that severity is "trivial", but
from a user standpoint I would say that it is at least "normal" if not "major".
Without it, users can not /will not make the transition to Mozilla.

Comment 13

[Robert Turnbull]

I did a fresh install of Mozilla 1.3a on a Win98 machine that had never before
had Netscape or Mozilla installed. The imported IE favorites tab was empty.
(just a small square) In reality there were hundreds of IE favorites. Thinking
this was a 1.3a problem I dropped back to 1.2.1. Still no favorites appeared. I
deleted the entire user profile and let 1.2.1 recreate the user profile. Still
no IE favorites. Removed 1.2.1 and installed 1.0.1. Still no IE favorites. Once
again I deleted the user profile and let 1.0.1 recreate the user profile. THIS
TIME IT WORKED, all the IE bookmarks appeared. I then uninstalled 1.0.1 and
reinstalled 1.3a. The Imported IE favorites STILL WORKED.

What this tells me is that there must be an error in initial profile creation
for 1.2.1 and up.

Comment 14

[Iván Baumann Fonay]

I have the same problem. Hundreds of IE favorites did not appear on my
"imported..." folder. Using Win 98 SE in Spanish, IE 6 in Spanish, Mozilla 1.3a
and a PC that after formatting never had itr installed before

Comment 15

[Pastor Eric Aschendorf]

When I bring down my bookmarks, then go to the "import IE favorites" a tiny
little tab starts to appear out the side but that is all. I can do nothing with it. 

Comment 16

[Sean Chittenden]

::puts on his "Me Too" hat::  Me too. 
 
This is a trivial software bug, it is a HUGE problem for users.  Could this bug's 
priority be increased? 

Comment 17

[Benjamin Smedberg]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 176715 ***

Comment 18

[Steve Chapel]

Bug 176715 is for when you do have IE Favorites and they are not imported. This
bug is for when you do *not* have any IE Favorites to import at all.

Comment 19

[henry verdel]

There is no way to import IE bookmarks manually this did not work in 1.3a, 1.3b
& 1.3 final

Comment 20

[Bryan]

HI,
CAN NOT IMPORT I.E. FAVORIES SINCE 1.2 ALPHA 1.1 WAS THE LAST VERSION TO IMPORT
THEM. THAT NEEDS TO BE FIXED WE ARE AT 1.4 ALPHA+ TODAY.

Comment 21

[Peto]

My friend uses WinXP and is interested in Mozilla. He even installed Mozilla
1.3.1, and absence of IE Favorites was his first compliant. IE Imported
Favorites is empty. We tried to manually import them, but import procedure
allows to select only ONE file at tima, no chance for SHIFT- or CTRL- selection.
Moreover, he has his favorites organised in many subfolders and standard Import
procedure has not mechanism to import favorites directory structure.
We tried to simply open Windows Explorer, find the favorites, select them all
(files + directories) and simply drag-and-drop them to Mozilla Bookmark Manager.
It worked! Partially.. The this way "imported" directories and subdirectories
and files inside them worked well. But the files in "root" directory of IE
Favorites were without name.
We tryed to workaround this by deleting everything we "imported", and dragging
the whole one Favorites folder, so there was IE Imported Favorites -> Favorites
-> (...) structure. But this didn't work -suddenly there, directly under IE
Imported Favorites there appeared one suspicious microsoft link without name,
that was the only thing visible under IE Imported when we accessed the Bookmarks
from Navigator. And even if we deleted this suspicious link that we didn't
create, hoping that now it will work, it resurrected.

What the weird things are going there?

I must agree, that this problem could seem not very dangerous for programmers,
but for users like my friend, who are interested in Mozilla and eventually they
might move from Explorer, are heavily affected by this bug. I understand him,
that if he collected his huge database of favorites for months, keeping order
with them, and now it wouldn't work with Mozilla, he will probably not migrate.

Comment 22

[Peto]

I personally use 1.4.rc1 under Windows 98 and here, without any effort, I have
IE Imported Favorites really imported and working. I haven't even use any
"Import". It worked automatically. Maybe there's some difficulty to work well
with WinXP user profiles.

Comment 23

[Michael T.]

Same Problem I can't import my ie faviorites either it is a pain.

Comment 24

[Peto]

With Windows XP and Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; sk-SK; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
the bug is still there.

Comment 25

[Peto]

For #24, it was probably due to Windows failure, not Mozilla's. In other
WindowsXP system which was not so "old and corrupted", it works fine.

Comment 26

[Peto]

I think it'll be necessarry to further study this bug if reappears, however, for
it could be significant lack of functionality for new Exploder emigrants.

Comment 27

[Bill Mason]

*** Bug 215430 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 28

[Greg Campbell]

Would fixing bug 215430 essentially fix this bug?

Comment 29

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 30

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420