580391 - IE migration of bookmarks is broken

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 476191

(Firefox :: Migration, defect)

Description

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

A report I was sent:

So, I'm over at my brother's house this weekend and he's using IE8. And I say, "dude, WTF? You know I work for Firefox right?" Anyway, I get him to download Fx and he tries it out later that night after I've gone home. So I check in with him yesterday  and he says it didn't import his favorites like it said it was going to. I double-check that he's just not looking in the wrong place but they are indeed missing. Then at David's suggestion I try to see if we can recreate the problem by having him delete his profile and starting over. So I did that this afternoon and we are able to reproduce the problem. On startup he tells Fx to import all of his info from IE, then he selects the option to use his home page from IE. It takes several minutes for the import process to complete before the Firefox window comes up. And when it finally does come up there are no bookmarks from IE. I'm attaching a screenshot and pasting in the troubleshooting info. He's running Visa Home Premium SP2.
What do you think? This was pretty embarrassing for me (not really embarrassing with my brother) - just thought that we run around getting people to try Firefox and the very first thing that happens is that it fails without even a cryptic error message.

Application Basics
Name         Firefox
Version         3.6.6
Profile Directory         
Installed Plugins         aboutlugins
Build Configuration         about:buildconfig
Extensions
Name         Version         Enabled         ID
Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant         0.0.0         true         {20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}
RealPlayer Browser Record Plugin         1.1.3         true         {ABDE892B-13A8-4d1b-88E6-365A6E755758}
Modified Preferences
Name         Value
browser.history_expire_days         3
browser.places.importBookmarksHTML         false
browser.places.smartBookmarksVersion         2
browser.startup.homepage         http://espn.go.com/
browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone         rv:1.9.2.6
extensions.lastAppVersion         3.6.6
network.cookie.prefsMigrated         true
privacy.sanitize.migrateFx3Prefs         true

Comment 1

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

cc'ing Marco who's familiar with this code, and setting qawanted keyword to get QA confirmation of this bug on Vista.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This is most likely result from our 100 years old migration code... It should really be rewritten in js with ctypes, and have tests!

Will try to reproduce, could be there is some malformed favorite in his ie profile? they're common, even if I thought we were skipping them.
What makes me wonder are those minutes, that means we imported bookmarks, any entry in moz_places?

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

also, does 4.0b2 import them? we changed quite a bit of code.

Comment 4

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

FWI, the user is my brother so we can ask him questions and get him to repeat
the problem if necessary.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

well, if QA is unable to reproduce with usual ie profiles, having a zipped up copy of his ie bookmarks would help, those are usually under "favorites" folder in the user's profile. You could send it zipped up by mail, so we can investigate the issue locally without exposing his personal data on the web)

Comment 6

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b5pre) Gecko/20100830 Firefox/4.0b5pre, I tested by creating some favorites in IE and then using File->Import to import them. This worked fine and they show up under Bookmarks.

I can try by using the migration path that is described in Comment 0.