Cannot save bookmark descriptions

[Spurred_On]

For years, going back to last century, in all the iterations of Mozilla browsers, I have been able to enter data into the Bookmarks/Properties/Description field and save it. These days I enter the data and hit the Save button, but nothing is saved.

Much worse, all of my descriptions data for my bookmarks has been cleared/deleted by Firefox. I am left with just an empty field. As I generally put my login data in that field, I have lost all of my login data for decades of saved browsing bookmarks, and as new data entered into the field is no longer saved, I can't manually update the bookmarks.

As the login data for many sites is saved separately in Firefox, when I go to many sites I am automatically logged in. But any other data, such as phone numbers or contact names, is gone.

How do I regain the ability to save data in bookmarks, and how do I keep Firefox from deleting/clearing bookmark Properties/Description data?

I'm using Firefox 56.2.1 on a Windows 10 system.

[the-edmeister]

This confuses me Firefox 56.2.1 ?? There was a 56.0.2. version, but never a 56.2.# version.

In Firefox 62.0b5 the Description field is gone from Bookmarks Properties. The Description data still exists, but in Fx 64 it will be removed.

Related Bugzilla reports.
Bug 1460577 - [meta] Remove support for bookmark annotations
Bug 1467131 - Clean up bookmark annotation data once annotations have been removed
Bug 1402890 - Stop supporting and remove the description annotation
Bug 1463738 - Remove the Bookmark description UI [62]

[jscher2000]

In your Firefox profile folder, you hopefully will find numerous .jsonlz4 files in the bookmarkbackups folder.

To convert one of these files to an HTML page -- which hopefully will give you a clean backup of your description data from before you lost it -- you can use this tool:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/bookbackreader.html

----

If you want to restore one of the .jsonlz4 backups to your live Firefox bookmarks (overwriting your current set), see: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/restore-bookmarks-from-backup-or-move-them

[Spurred_On]

the-edmeister Sorry for the confusion. Since it became available, I have been using Waterfox, the 64-bit version of Firefox compiled by Alex Kontos. The current version of Waterfox is 56.2.1.

The Description data still exists, but in Fx 64 it will be removed.

That brings up two questions:

1. How can I transfer over my present Waterfox profile to Fx 64? Will a simple copy and paste work?
2. Can another field in FX 64 bookmarks be used to add in notes?

jscher2000 Thanks for your reply. I have a lot of .jsonlz4 files both in my bookmarkbackups folder going back to February of 2017, and in my sessionstore-backups going back to February of this year. One of the early versions from sessionstore-backups should work.

[costark]

Suppose your Restore - .jsonlz4 - feature stopped making backups 7 days ago and you want 3 days ago Bookmarks restored.
IF you rename Today's - places.sqlite- to (.old) and paste the Same File from a 3-days-ago saved Profile ... does THAT give you a usable Bookmark Folder from 3 days ago?

[Spurred_On]

costark that's what I'm going to try, although as I have saved no new bookmarks in the past few weeks, I will go back to an earlier version, maybe in May.

What I don't understand is why some bookmark descriptions have deleted themselves and others have remained.

[Spurred_On]

My desktop computer has an older version installed than on my laptop, and all of the bookmark description data displays normally there. I will copy the most recent .jsonlz4 file from my desktop's profile and paste it into my laptop's profile folder.

[the-edmeister]

I wonder if the Waterfox developer made a change to Firefox code and did away with the Description feature for Bookmarks?
Or maybe he broke it inadvertently for saving new Descriptions?


.

[frg]

Make sure that browser.places.useAsyncTransactions is set to false. I needed to backport at least 1 fix to SeaMonkey 2.53 based on 56 for this to work.

[Spurred_On]

Thanks frg. I was hoping your suggestion would be the solution, but in this profile browser.places.useAsyncTransactionsfile was already set to false.

At this point, I can neither export (save) my present laptop bookmarks nor import bookmarks saved from my desktop profile to my laptop profile. The desktop profile is working normally.

the-edmeister I have logged into the Waterfox forum and will ask your ask your question there, but I want to try a few more solutions first. I'm thinking of downloading and installing the 64-bit version of Firefox, but unsure how much of my present profile I should copy over.