254292 - Add support for exporting specific bookmark folders

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Markus Lindström]

This is a feature request.

I believe it would be very useful if users could export just one bookmark folder
at a time, or even select which bookmarks are to be exported.

As far as implementing this in the UI goes, I suggest adding a context menu item
in the Bookmark Manager ("Export this folder", "Export this bookmark"), but then
the Export wizard itself should (preferrably) get enhanced. For example, we
could put two radio buttons labeled "Export everything" and "Select what to
export", and when the latter is selected it would show the bookmark tree and
allow a user to select what to take, either by ways of individual checkboxes or
a more file-manager-like approach, where Ctrl-clicking would select other items.

To make this vision more concrete, please see the following homemade ASCII mockup:

+--------------------------------+
| Export bookmarks            [X]|
+--------------------------------+
|  [O] Export everything         |
|  [ ] Select what to export     |
|                                |
|      +---------------------+   |
|      |  + Bookmarks        |   |
|      |  |-- Livemarks      |   |
|      |  |  |-- adot's notbl|   |
|      | ...                 |   |
|      +---------------------+   |
|        [OK]     [Cancel]       |
+--------------------------------+ 

This is just a mockup I drew from the top of my head, there are, most likely,
more elegant ways to get the same functionality.

Comment 1

[Bill Brown]

Greetings:

I would like to add to this request because I switch OS distributions often and
would like to be able to keep up with my bookmarks easily.  Here is a sample xml
format for them

<bookmarks>
  <bookmark>
    <url>http://www.w3.org</url>
    <name>W3 web</name>
    <desc>a website for standards.</desc>
  </bookmark>
  ...
</bookmarks>

CSV would also work too.  Or, are the bookmarks serialized out to any of the
configuration files?  This would make it easy to copy and past them into a file
for later import on a different machine. 

Thanks.  

Comment 2

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

*** Bug 297133 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

*** Bug 300879 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[zug_treno]

*** Bug 325860 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 359580 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Carlo 'Carcarlo' Carmagnini]

I think many people would like to share personal bookmarks, sending to friends
or publishing them on the web. 
The new exporting feature should also have the option to clean the code from extra stuff like description, last visited date, added etc. The resulting XHTML code should be semantically correct.
It would be nice if you could choose in what format you want to export: valid xhtml, xml, rss 2.0.

So here's the feature request on Manage Bookmarks window:
1) export only selected bookmars/folders (using checkboxes)
2) possibility to choose what to export (just name/url with/without extra info)
3) export in valid XHTML, semantically correct or other standard markup.

Comment 7

[Cees T.]

Alternatively, you could open your bookmarks.html (on Linux it's at /home/<user>/.mozilla/firefox/<salt>.<profile>/bookmarks.html) and copy the interesting bits from there.

Comment 9

[Wolfgang Beyer]

This useful feature request is waiting for implementation since 5 years. If there is not enough manpower or interest for offering extensive export options in Bookmark Manager as proposed above why not simply generally export the marked bookmark folder only instead of the whole bookmark tree for now?

@Cees T.: Copying after full export and subsequent very cumbersome extraction of the part of interest from the HTML code?

Comment 11

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

there is a wip patch in the duplicate bug 459739

Comment 13

[nimrod]

It would be sufficient to add the Option "Export this Bookmark Folder" in the right click menu of the Folders in the standard Bookmarks Bar.

Then the normal export process for the whole bookmarks collection could be used, but only for the chosen folder.

In my opinion this would be a really usefull feature for many people who would like to share their findings when they research something on the internet (like best prices, recepies, and so on).

It would also strenghten the integration of the existing userbase into firefox!

Comment 14

[alex_mayorga]

¡Hola!

Ended up here while researching for https://support.mozilla.org/es/questions/1181450

Found the following duplicates:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/831118
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1034047

So t seems to still be wanted after 13 years =)

¡Gracias!
Alex

Comment 16

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

The use-cases for this are unclear and rare, there are workarounds like copy/paste into an editor, and WebExtensions can cover other needs yet.