1909560 - Expose the Bookmark lastModified field on the WebExtension APIs

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Eric Marceau]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0

Steps to reproduce:

Please refer to

https://github.com/igorlogius/igorlogius/issues/34

for details regarding issue.

Bookmarks file exported using Firefox built-in "backup" function creates JSON file which reports structure in-situ.

HOWEVER, the API provided for extract/import described at

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/bookmarks/BookmarkTreeNode

seems to show bookmark "properties" that are not even present in the JSON exported by Firefox itself. Other properties, notably "tags", "keyword", and "lastModified" are apparently not (or no longer) made visible for export via the API. If that is so, why would the internal tool achieve what the API cannot.

There does not appear to be a unified consistency between the two methods.

Actual results:

The API is not able to provide the functionality required to export end-user Bookmarks tree with full, verifiable, integrity into a JSON/HTML file.

The "tags", "keyword", and "lastModified" properties cannot be exported, leaving the exported file a corrupted image of the end-user profile's Bookmarks tree.

Expected results:

The API should have the full set of functionality that permits a developer to properly reproduce the browser's actions via programmed action, thereby facilitating such independent developers to fully act as part of the "extended team" advancing the good works of the Mozilla team.

The API should allow visibility of, and access to, the "tags", "keyword", and "lastModified" properties so that these may be properly exported, enabling such an export to expected integrity to fully match the end-user profile's Bookmarks tree.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Bookmarks & History' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Thank you for the report.

Tags are already covered by bug 1225916. Unfortunately making those accessible on the API is blocked on some other needed work to rework how they are handled internally.

For Keywords, we are considering removing them from being stored alongside bookmarks, and adding them as search engines instead. Though the exact details are still to be decided. In any case, we wouldn't want to expose these on the API at this time because of potentially removing them later. The meta bug for the work is bug 1650874.

Last modified is a possibility of something that we could expose. We need to check that Firefox Sync doesn't rely on it being set correctly (we think it doesn't but just in case), and it would need to have some boundaries (i.e. greater than dateAdded and not in the future). Note that Google Chrome does not expose the last modified date either, so this would be a slight variance on their API.

Therefore I'm changing this bug to be explicitly about the last modified case, since tags are already covered and keywords are probably a won't fix.