489540 - ghost bookmark entries apear in awesomebar which dont show up in organize bookmarks

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 431558

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[MK]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8

I keep getting a tophit for a specific URL which i used to have bookmarked. I deleted the bookmark, but it keeps showing up in the awesomebar. I tried deleting it via cmd+shift+backspace in the awesomebar, but it reapears (as starred) the next time i start typing the URL. It neither shows up in the bookmark organizer at all nor in the exported bookmarks.html.

Another bookmark which i associated with a keyword, doesn't show up in organize bookmarks either. It keeps appearing in the awesomebar tho. This time without a filled star. Attempts to create a new bookmark with the same keyword are not successful, since the old bookmark is called when entering the keyword in the bar.

It feels as if there would be two sources for bookmarks, one which shows up in the organizer+awesomebar and a second one which only shows up in the awesomebar.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
All bookmarks should be editable in organize bookmarks. Deleting bookmarks in the awesomebar should actually delete them.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Deleting a bookmark in the awesomebar will only remove its history, and is expected.

Are you sure you don't have the bookmark anywhere, have you tried searching in the sidebar for part of its title or url?
Could those be live bookmarks (feeds) children?

Comment 2

[MK]

I'm sure the bookmarks don't appear neither in the bookmark user interfaces (sidebar, organize bookmarks) nor in the exported bookmark files. They only appear in the awesomebar as suggestions.

They are/were real bookmarks not live bookmarks.

Bookmark A: http://podcast_portal.kiste shows as a starred bookmark in the awesomebar.

Bookmark B: http://www.google.com/int/en/ appears unstarred in the awesomebar but has the keyword 'g' still associated with it, so i think its a bookmark and not a history entry.

Both keep reappearing after deleting in the awesomebar.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

so, if they are considered bookmarks by Places, even if you remove them through the location bar, they will reappeat because locationbar shows both history and bookmarks (this behavior will be easy configurable in 3.5) and the action you are doing is "remove history for this page".

The real issue here is to understand why those are considered bookmarks if they are not shown anywhere in our bookmarks interface nor in the Library (aka Organize Bookmarks).
Do they have/had any tag associated with them?

Comment 4

[MK]

I digged a little in places.sqlite and found that said bookmarks where still present in moz_bookmarks. The entries had parent id of folders. Those folders had parent ids that didn't exist. After changing the folder parent ids to 3 (Bookmarks Toolbar) they reappeard in the UI.

It seems that in an update the database got "corrupted" (maybe in a beta release of FF3, when the places UI was still a little buggy). I found all bookmark-toolbar subfolders duplicated with a wrong parent id.

The awesome toolbar seems to request bookmarks in a different way than the library UI.

A solution could be deleting orphaned bookmarks, or not showing orphaned bookmarks in the awesomebar.

For me the problem seems solved for now.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

looks like what we cleanup with preventive maintenance, that's bug 431558, we could dupe there.

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv