Backing up bookmarks to HTML = File always getting larger?

[Im_Special]

So every few months I'll back up my bookmarks by exporting them to a HTML file with Firefox, yesterday I did some "spring cleaning" of my bookmarks, deleting the old ones I never use anymore, and now I'm noticing that even with less bookmarks, the size of the HTML file is even larger then it was before.

Why is this? And is there a way to to shrink this down, I'd imagine some useless data is being kept around in there every time my bookmarks change, is this a bug?

Actually I've Googled a bit before posting here and found two posts related about this, but they are from 2011 and 2007, I guess it's icon data being left?

https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Firefox/ ... d-p/328460
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 7&t=538462

Unfortunately I can't make much sense of the "JavaScript code" talk from those threads, I'll need a ELI5 version, heh.

Through Google I also found a temp fix. By using Internet Explorer and importing your bookmarks from the HTML file Firefox creates, then export them again with IE, you'll have a file about 80% smaller. I saved MB's doing this. Here are two pics showing the difference, maybe some can make sense of it.

But this isn't ideal, it's rather annoying to do and would like Firefox to just dish out a clean file instead.

http://i.imgur.com/J4oA0rO.png
http://i.imgur.com/QlrE6TZ.png

Guess which one is from Firefox and which is from IE!

[LIMPET235]

Moving to Firefox Support...

[Virtual_ManPL]

You may want to:
- do places database cleaning (go to about:support and press "Verify integrity" at nearly end of the page), and after this export bookmarks to HTML
- if it still has kinda big size, try to export it as backup in JSON to purge all favicons

[Im_Special]

Thanks for the answer! So I tried the verify integrity, but it still exports to a big(er) sized HTML file, by using the backup option it does produce a much small file size, I'm assuming I can just delete my firefox bookmarks, then import them from the json, then export them to a HTML file again to get a smaller size?

I'm at work now so can't really test it right now.

[kreemoweet]

Nevermind - missed image links in original post

[therube]

Well the one has "favicon", embedded, where the other has pointers (URL) to the icons.
(At least for the portion that you have displayed.)

[dfoulkes]

...and I would backup that places.sqlite file before messing around with it much.... it would be a shame to lose it.