Explorer to Firefox migration

[robert McLean]

I have recently installed FC5 on a dual boot system with Windows XP on 2 other hard drives. I have Explorer on my old windows drives and I would like to copy them over into Firefox bookmarks. The help file says that when you first install Firefox that it copies over all your favorites automatically ,but this did not happen for me. and I dont see how it possiblly could since Firefox was installed as part of my FC5 install, and at that point i obviously hadnt mounted my windows hard drives, so how could Firefox see my Explorer data.

So is there a way of importing my explorer data after installation of firefox ? When I triy to use the Import Wizaed it just comes up with a screen that says "import bookmarks etc etc from: " and then where I suspect should be a list of locations is just a blank.

Do I have to uninstall Firefox, and then reinstall it, and if so I do I guarantee it sees my Explorer data ?

Has any body done this ?

[ilja]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_bookmarks
Does this help you?

[JordanN]

Fedora and WindowsXP are entirely separate operating systems. Programmers have yet to routinely program their software to search the user's system to determine what other operating systems might be present on the other partitions of the hard drive.

What you need to do is export your Firefox bookmarks in Windows to an HTML file. Do this by going to Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks > Export in Firefox. Save the file somewhere you can find it. Copy the bookmarks.html file to a diskette, USB drive, or a shared partition.

Reboot into Fedora. Once in Fedora, start Firefox. Again, go to Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks, but this time select Import. When the wizard appears, select "From File". Find your bookmarks.html file, and load it. You should be all set.

If you intend to continue to use both operating systems, you should install the Google Browser Sync Firefox extension. It keeps all of your browser settings synchronized. The only downside to it is that it can take a while sometimes to do the actual synchronization, and sometimes errors occur that mess up your bookmarks. You can get Google Browser Sync from http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/ .

[Greem]

Boot to Windows.
Fire up IE
Follow the "Export bookmarks" instructions detailed in the previous post
Save the file onto a filesystem you can access from your FC5 system

Boot into FC5
Start Firefox
Import the bookmarks following the instructions in the previous post.

Job done!

It's worth noting that you can't expect to have FF detect the fact that you're dual booting; most systems have a habit of assuming they're the only ones around

[robert McLean]

Thanks for the answers. I will give it a try. I had forgotten that there was an export favorites or bookmarks command in IE.

It's worth noting that you can't expect to have FF detect the fact that you're dual booting; most systems have a habit of assuming they're the only ones around

Well precisely. That is why I could not understand the claim in the section of the Firefox help file for former IE users that stated it automatically copied bookmarks, passwords and other settings.

But I should be OK now.