388053 - implement profile migrator (import bookmarks, history) for Safari for Windows

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 710259

(Firefox :: Migration, enhancement)

Description

[cmtalbert]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.9a7pre) Gecko/2007071212 Minefield/3.0a7pre
Build Identifier:  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a7pre) Gecko/200707130505 Minefield/3.0a7pre

This is a bit early, I realize, but if you install the Safari 3 beta on Windows XP and attempt to migrate the Safari settings to Firefox, you cannot.  There is no entry in the Migration wizard page for Safari.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install the Safari Beta, store some bookmarks and form history
2. Run Minefield nightly call the Migration wizard by sleceting File->Import
Actual Results:  
There is no Safari entry on the resulting Migration Wizard page

Expected Results:  
There should be a Safari entry on the resulting Migration Wizard page

Comment 2

[AndrewM]

Now that Apple has released Safari 3.1 for Windows, I think the priority should be bumped up to normal. I think there will be a few people who will want to migrate their bookmarks and history from Safari 3.1 to Firefox 3 and will be frustrated to find out that they can't. (I realise that this almost certainly couldn't make Firefox 3 because we're almost at RC1, but it might make people a little less frustrated if they see it marked as normal rather than just an enhancement :)

Also, maybe change the URL field to http://www.apple.com/safari/ ? And to help people find the bug and avoid dupes, maybe add something like "unable to import bookmarks or history" to the summary?

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Sure. Adjusting severity and download URL.

Comment 4

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

This is an enhancement request, regardless of how important it is to fix. In general, the severity marked in the bug has very little impact on whether or not a bug gets fixed, so I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it :)

Comment 5

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Raymond mentioned that he is unable to do this during the 3.6 beta smoketest and wondered if this would discourage people from trying out Firefox since they might not if they can't migrate their data.

Comment 6

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

As far as I know, Safari uses the same file formats for its profile on OS X and windows. That is the plist formats (the binary & xml variants). However, only OS X offers APIs to access plists. These native apis work for both plists format.

So, as I started working on a rewrite of Mac Safari migrator in JS (bug 710259), I figured I _could_ write our own parsers for the two plist formats. With few tweaks, that would make the new migrator work for Windows Safari.

I decided not to do so, for now. That is, I'm sticking to the native APIs. However, the new code is written with all this in mind. The native-plist-parsering  is encapsulated well enough, that one could easily replace it with a new js plist reader, without having to rewrite the profile migraotr.

If anyone jumps in to implement such a parser, Apple kindly documented the binary format in this file:
http://opensource.apple.com/source/CF/CF-550/CFBinaryPList.c

(Look for "magic number ("bplist")")