Migration from Chrome missing all bookmark icons
In the migration from Chrome to FF 71, everything was successfully imported, except for bookmark icons. The only way I can get the favicons is to manually load each site, and even then, it won't load an icon for some sites (at&t, e.g.). Since I have 1000's of bookmarks this is not a solution. Any suggestions.
All Replies (8)
Unfortunately, the only solution is to open each bookmark. Firefox does not migrate bookmark icons from other browsers.
Sorry.
Cor-el, thanks for the ext. Curious, I haven't synced with my laptop yet. Should I sync before or after running Checkmarks or does it matter?
If you are talking about syncing more bookmarks from your laptop to this computer, then it's probably easier to sync first and then run the Checkmark add-on.
If you are talking about syncing the bookmarks from this computer to your laptop, it won't make a difference, since Firefox Sync also doesn't transfer your favicons.
Right now my desktop has all the imported Crome bookmarks but no bookmark icons came with the import. I have not turned sync on.
My laptop also does not have sync turned on and essentially no bookmarks (new profile).
My plan was to import the bookmarks to the desktop and then turn sync on both machines so the imported bookmarks would then be synced to the laptop. I had expected the bookmark icons to be imported from Chrome as well. Having a bookmark import from another browser feature without importing icons would be, in my opinion, a serious design flaw.
Your saying that favicons are not transfered in a sync doesn't make any sense. In the past if I added a new bookmark to the desktop (not on the laptop), it synced to the laptop with the icon and vice versa. So if bookmark icons (favicons) are not synced, then if I ran the Checkmarks extension on the desktop to create favicons (or created them manually) and then synced, the laptop would have all the bookmarks but NO icons and I would have the same problem on the laptop.
According to bug 428378, icon data is not transferred via Firefox Sync. It dramatically increases the size of the data that needs to be stored and transferred through Firefox Sync (it would triple the size). As well, I believe there is a privacy-related concern about transferring that data.
Thanks Wesley. Hell of a thread. 10 years and counting. I do know Chrome syncs the icons and I understand other browsers like Opera do as well. I can't imagine what the privacy issue is in syncing the icon data, unless it's more than just an image tied to a url. As far as quantity of data and speed, Chrome does it just fine. Of course, google is no poster child for privacy.
I don't understand this concern over not syncing favicons because of size. On an old profile I have 5777 items with icons and favicons.sqlite is 4,194,304 (4.2 mb). On my current profile just imported with no icons, 7492 items and the favicons.sqlite is 5,242,880 (5.2 mb), not significant at all. The places.sqlite file is larger.
I know lots of people have 20k to 30k bookmarks but if this scales we're not talking gbs. I'm sorry, I don't get it. I must be missing something.
Modified