255728 - 1.8a bookmarks no longer backwards compatible with older Mozilla / Netscape - converts ' to '

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 255087

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Nathan Lineback]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040813
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040813

Many people, especially web developers, depend on multiple versions of Mozilla
installed on their computers for testing purposes.

By default, current versions of Mozilla use the same profiles and bookmarks as
older versions of Mozilla as well as Netscape.

After running a current Mozilla 1.8a build and then opening a previous version
of Mozilla or Netscape on the same machine, the bookmarks menu will contain
"'" where apostrophes were.

Symptom: Bookmark corruption


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1: Install Mozilla 1.7 (Any earlier version of Mozilla or Netscape 6.x or 7.x
will also demonstrate this problem)
2: With Mozilla 1.7, bookmark a page with an apostrophe in the title.
3: Install the current Mozilla 1.8a in a different folder.
4: Open Mozilla 1.8a - at this point the bookmark should appear correct.
5: Close Mozilla 1.8a.
6: Open Mozilla 1.7 - the bookmark will now display ' instead of the apostrophe.

(And as an additional problem, close Mozilla 1.7 and open Mozilla 1.8a again and
the bookmarks will still display as ' !)

Actual Results:  
After doing this, bookmarks will now display ' instead of the apostrophe in
older Mozillas and even in current Mozilla builds. 

Expected Results:  
Apostrophe should have remained an apostrophe.

More information:
The 1.8a builds convert apostrophes in the bookmark file to ' but will
display this as an apostrophe. Earlier versions of Mozilla and Netscape do not
recognize this and instead display "'". (And as an additional problem
earlier versions of Mozilla and Netscape convert this to &amp#39; which 1.8a
will then also display as "'")

Justification for fixing this:
* This bug causes permanent data corruption in the bookmarks that users can only
fix by manual correction (a pain if someone has many bookmarks) or restoring
from a backup and then avoiding incompatible versions of Mozilla.
* This bug is highly visible and ugly.
* This interferes with one of the major selling points of Mozilla - that, unlike
a certain other browser, you can have multiple versions installed.

Proposed solutions:
1: Mozilla should be backward compatible and store the apostrophe in the
bookmark file as just an apostrophe.
2: Mozilla should take extra steps to create a new separate profile for
different installed versions.

Comment 1

[Bill Mason]

This is a wontfix per bug 255087 comment 1.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 255087 ***