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In defense of Firefox

In defense of Firefox

Posted May 29, 2008 6:06 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599)
In reply to: In defense of Firefox by kjp
Parent article: In defense of Firefox

The relational db part of sqlite isn't the issue, ...

I believe it's one of the issues. Some of us like the ability to hand-edit the bookmarks file, grep it, diff it, copy/merge it between machines, etc. (Granted, there are probably better ways to handle the latter...) If I'm not mistaken (and here I [blush] have to admit that I have yet to try FF3, so I easily could be mistaken), bookmarks are one of the things now hidden within the binary blob that is the sqlite database.

Greg


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In defense of Firefox

Posted May 29, 2008 6:45 UTC (Thu) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]

So just run

sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/places.sqlite

and hand-edit the bookmark database via simple SQL commands...

In defense of Firefox

Posted May 29, 2008 11:02 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Because knowlege of use of text editors implies knowledge of SQL commands?

In defense of Firefox

Posted May 29, 2008 11:43 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

I would say knowledge of how to use a text editor to edit your 
bookmarks.xml files pretty much implies sufficient knowledge to learn a 
couple of SELECTs.

In defense of Firefox

Posted Jun 5, 2008 9:52 UTC (Thu) by anandsr21 (guest, #28562) [Link]

I find your faith in the cut copy paste generation, disturbing ;-).

In defense of Firefox

Posted May 29, 2008 8:23 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

The really good news is that *history*, which used to be in the appalling "mork" format, is
now also in SQLite. So accessing your history data just got increadibly easier.

In defense of Firefox

Posted May 29, 2008 12:59 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Seconded. Anything which kills mork off for good and hurls it into the Sun 
with a stake through its heart is a good thing in my book.

In defense of Firefox

Posted May 29, 2008 9:23 UTC (Thu) by Tuxie (guest, #47191) [Link]

Normally I'd agree with you but Sqlite is a pretty standard and is supported just about
everywhere, and the flexibility improvements it adds to Firefox are significant and definitely
worth it. If you want to manipulate the data outside of FF, run "sqlite3 path/to/db.sqlite"
and manipulate whatever you want with standard SQL. You can also use just any programming
language there is to automate your FF-data manipulation tasks, something that was way harder
before.

In defense of Firefox

Posted May 29, 2008 13:43 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

The bookmarks.html file is still there; it's just no longer authoritative. So you can search
it (and use it as your home page) as before; it probably wouldn't be hard to write something
to take a HTML file and update the database with it, either, but I don't know if anyone's
written that. Personally, what I'd like is if they made "live bookmarks" in the HTML file have
a button to use AJAX to get recent items.

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