276169 - Bookmarks completely lost in Firefox 1.0; also Bookmarks cannot be moved/scrolled Up

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[bugz9]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

After using Firefox 2 weeks, I have found some serious Bugs in the Bookmark
handling functions.

1) Every week the Firefox 1.0 program seems to lose all Bookmarks, resulting in
the 3rd and final item in the Bookmarks pull down menu being:
[ ]Bookmarks Toolbar Folder -> (Empty)

This is a disastrous Bug and must be fixed immediately. Heavy users of any
Browser use Bookmarks heavily. Furthermore, work that users have accomplished
and typed into a PC (in this case, finding and recording web site URLs) must
never ever be lost.  That is a catastrophic error and must be fixed immediately.
My PC has crashed a few times  recently; maybe that contributed. However, there
must be a backup recovery operation to save the work product (Bookmarks) of the
user.
Stop everything and fix this Bug immediately.

If you cannot find the Bug immediately, at the very least Back Up the bookmarks
periodically in a separate opened and flushed and closed file so that the
bookmarks may be imported from that file when this error occurs.

2) The ability of the browser heavy user to move new Bookmarks to the top ( in
my opinion, new bookmarks should be put at the top of the list in the fist
place) is defective.
Dragging the entry to be moved up to the the narrow row near the top of the
Bookmark list to scroll the bookmarks so that the selected item can be moved to
the top does not work.
I operate my display at 1600x1200; perhaps this causes the 'scroll row' to be
too narrow to be mouse selected.  Who knows.  Of course, this occurs when there
are more bookmarks than can fit in the Firefox window.

Politics

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Sufficient details for the 2 different Bugs were given in Details.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Sufficient details for the 2 different Bugs were given in Details.

Expected Results:  
Sufficient details for the 2 different Bugs were given in Details.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 218636 ***

Comment 2

[bugz9]

If this is a duplicate of previous Bugs going back several months if not more
than a year, how could such a disastrous Bug not already be fixed, one way or
another ?
This indicates a serious disconnect between the Developers and the Users.
No program should should ever destroy the produce of the time and keyboard or
mouse inputs by the User, ever.  Ever.  Wasting the time of the User cannot ever
be acceptable.
This is worse than the failures of Netscape years back, when Internet Explorer
took the lead in the browser Features race. (And there is no question the idiots
at Netscape deserved to go down).
As I have mentioned, if the bug cannot be found, then the Developers should
create a Backup file after every write to the Bookmarks file.
Or simply do this like Microsoft does it in the Favorites directory:
make every Bookmark entry a separate file or directory in the Favorites directory.
I want to hear why the Developers have not reached one stopgap measure or
another to address this problem.
This is Top Priority.

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The problem is that this "bug" as you call it is caused by a combination of
other factors, and without being able to reproduce the behavior, then it's
impossible to fix the bug. Obviously this does not affect all users. If you are
part of the 0.001% of users seeing the bug, then coming in here and raising a
fuss about how important the bug is and how everyone should fix it right away
won't do much good. You're asking that a backup be made, and we're telling you
that one is made. The bookmark backup exists exactly because a minuscule
percentage of people manage to lose their bookmarks somehow.

The file is named "bookmarks.bak" and should be in your profile alongside your
regular bookmarks file.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 218636 ***

Comment 4

[bugz9]

That is the Netscape attitude.  A failure to recognize how important it is that
a User's time and work is wasted and/or destroyed.
If a backup exists, then why is it not being used to reinstate the Bookmarks list ?
It is not easy to find out how to report a Bug to the developers of this program.
The Help pull down does not present a "Contact Us" to the user and the home page
does not lead directly to a Report A Bug entry page.
You may believe that making it difficult to report Bugs will cut down on
duplicate Bug entries, but one effect of this sort of interference with the
average user's ability to report bugs is the result that only certain types of
people will take the time to figure it out.  Usually those are people who like
to hang out of forums and chat, not heavy users of the program in question.
To those sorts of people, a simple (and, I believe, simple to solve, one way or
the other) Bug like destroying users' work product in the form of Bookmarks is
too simple to talk about and focus upon.
Often times, these people like the idea of knowing that there is a serious Bug,
which is not fixed, and they are the only ones who know how to work around it.
You are claiming that there is a backup created somewhere.  That is a clear
indication of the kind of forum problem I am describing.
The usual result for most users:  they go back to the Microsoft product rather
than battle with the entrenched denizens in these forums.

Comment 5

[Justin Wood (:Callek)]

If you can provide reproduceable testcases this would be much easier to fix
without a backup, we cant restore the backup file "blindly" without some way to
know the actual bookmarks file is broken...and if we could know, this bug
wouldnt be around.

Other issues on "Ease of Bug Reporting" etc would be other bugs entirely and
need to be left out of this bug Report.

"We" are not all Netscape[sic] (Mozilla) employee's many of us are volunteers
who do this to improve not only your use of the product, but our own. I for
example am a college student in MA, and am not affiliated in any way with Mozilla.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 218636 ***

Comment 6

[bugz9]

By the way, I do not see a "bookmarks.bak" file anywhere on my C: drive, let
alone in the Defaults\Profiles directory.
I do see a Bookmarks.htm which when opened seems to contain Help information
about Bookmarks rather than the bookmarks themselves.

The destruction of the Bookmarks has not occurred from what I can see directly
resulting from a user input.  Thus I cannot post a clear antecedent sequence.
If you cannot find the bug, then for the time being create a series of maybe 3
backups and cycle them.
Then whenever the first instance of the Firefox program displays the known
symptomatic Bookmark layout, ask the user if he wishes to restore from any of
these Bookmark backup files.

Comment 7

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 218636 ***

Comment 8

[bugz9]

What about the element of this Bug Report which relates to the inability to
drag/scroll items at the bottom of the list to the top when the list is longer
than a single Firefox window can display ?
Has anyone responded to that yet ?
Or should I make that a separate Bug Report ?

Comment 9

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

No. That is bug 194319.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 194319 ***

Comment 10

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Which I just submitted a patch for, by the way.

Comment 11

[Justin Wood (:Callek)]

For future reference, "Defaults/Profiles" is not your profile directory, that is
a directory where it populates the actual profile with for "defaults"... your
profile is under a hidden folder on your system (for win32) so you must search
in hidden files and folders.

For Windows XP Specifically..

C:\Documents and Settings\<Current User>\....

Exact file-path I cannot recall at the moment...but that gives you an idea.

Comment 12

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Going to Start->Run and typing %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ will show you
a list of your profiles. If you have more than one, it's likely that a new one
was created and your old bookmarks still exist in the old one. Go into each
folder you see there and look for your bookmarks. The bookmarks file is named
bookmarks.html and the backup is named bookmarks.bak.

Comment 13

[bugz9]

I found the files bookmarks.html and bookmarks.bak in a directory under the
C:\Documents and Settings\MB3\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ directory.
Both files when opened under Internet Explorer are empty and they are both 95 KB
long. And my Booksmarks list under Firefox has become empty again.

Comment 14

[Marilyn Fisher]

I am having the same problem. I have bookmarked several pages 6 diferent times
and they do not stay bookmarked, they just disapear by the time I reopen firefox.
Marilyn Fisher 1-01-05

Comment 15

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

*** Bug 272176 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

I've uncovered a reproducable method to make bookmarks *disappear*:

-open a web page
-open a new tab and load a local file in that tab
-open a another web page to a third tab
-set the home page to this group of tabs in Tools | Options | General | Homepage
| Use Current Pages
-rename or move the local file that is part of the group of pages set as Homepages
-Restart Firefox 

tested results:
first tab opens, second tab throws error (as expected) and opens blank, but
third tab is not opened. (see bug 245588)  But what's really bad is that all
toolbar bookmarks have disappeared and the bookmarks toolbar menu no longer
lists bookmarks. However, bookmarks are present in bookmarks manager and the
bookmarks sidebar.

expected results:
no removal of bookmarks from the toolbar bookmarks or bookmarks menu

workaround is to remove the corrupt local file bookmark from the group in
homepage and restart.  Doing that will restore the bookmark views.


Vlad, I hope that's enough to nail this puppy. :-)

Comment 17

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Marking this fixed from the patch in 245588.  I'm not sure whether this is
really a dupe as reproduced, but if its generic bookmarks disappearing, its a
dupe, and if its still happening, we need to revisit that bug.

Comment 18

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

verifying fixed with Windows Fx trunk build 205-01-21-07-trunk

look to bug 263520 and bugs mentioned there for other possible bookmark loss
scenarios.  Unfortunately, none of those bugs has a reproducable test case.  

Comment 19

[bugz9]

I do not recall doing any of the things in that scenario such as opening a new 
tab, at least not intentionally.
My inclination is normally to Open In New Window, which wasone of the 2 key 
features Microsoft added which killed Netscape years back, when Netscape failed 
to respond.
I have had several crashes recently so I have assumed that the bookmarks file 
became corrupted through some sort of incomplete save/flush.
I have not had a chance to simulate hard cold reset crashes to test this out.

I also think that the Keyword dataloss should be split into UserDataLoss and 
OtherDataLoss. Data from some web site can always be retrieved by rereading it 
from the web site source. UserData created with the user's time should be 
considered sacrosanct and hold a much higher priority.

Comment 20

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Right, your bug was filed in an indistinct way, and it sort of morphed, although
it shouldn't have.  Really, its a duplicate of an existing bug, which seems to
be marked fixed, but perhaps shouldn't have been.

Re-resolving.  If you're consistently losing the contents of your bookmarks,
please track down the most recent events that occured (system crash/power
loss/other errors) and file a new, clean bug detailing that your bookmarks have
been deleted and what steps led to this.

Comment 21

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

My appology for morphing the bug. I shouldn't have done that. But mconnor is
correct that this should remain resolved as it is or duped. See comment 18 for
other possible bugs. We badly need rock solid steps to reproduce bookmark.html
loss. If you're able to provide such, it would be greatly appreciated. And the
bug will have a much much better chance of being solved.

you can log a bug against bugzilla for the keyword request.

Comment 22

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change