Question about bookmark behavior

Firefox Development
#1

I am curious how bookmarks behave in FF57.

Over a decade ago, Firefox allowed me to put bookmarks into multiple folders. In other words, I could bookmark a webpage and place the bookmark in Folder A, and then bookmark the webpage again and place the second bookmark in Folder B. This was an essential tool in my work! For example, I might use Folder A to store bookmarks to webpages that were useful when writing a certain paper for a class, and use Folder B to store bookmarks to webpages useful when writing a different paper. If both papers required some French translations, then both Folder A and Folder B would include a bookmark to an online French-English dictionarys.

Then, many years ago, Firefox changed its bookmark behavior. Now, if a bookmark existed in Folder A, and I tried to add it to Folder B, the bookmark would move from A to B. In other words, the bookmark couldn’t live in two folders at once. I understand that this was easier from the developers’ point of view (because now each bookmark had a unique location in the bookmark folder tree), but this kept me from using Firefox in a useful way. So I installed an add-on named Old Add Bookmark Behavior, which restored the old system.

A few years ago, the Old Add Bookmark Behavior extension stopped working. Since then, I have been manually editing my bookmarks. I’m not joking – every time I want to add a bookmark, I open the Bookmark Library and add it manually. I would have switched to a different browser, but I have literally hundreds of bookmarks in Firefox, so I didn’t want to go through the trouble.

Today, with the huge FF57 update, it occurs to me that Firefox’s bookmark behavior might have changed again, and maybe I’m doing something manually that I don’t need to do.

Can anyone tell me how bookmarks work in today’s Firefox? If a bookmark exists in Folder A, and I try to add it to Folder B, what happens?

Not upgrading to FF 57: pros, cons, instructions
#2

I think you can always drag and drop the tab to add the same bookmark to multiple places, and the Bookmark button will editing the last one.

#3

There is nothing inherent in Firefox bookmarks which prevents multiple bookmarks from being added for the same URL (either in the same folder or different folders). The change to having the add-bookmark behavior restrict bookmarks to one per URL is something that, almost certainly, was because some developer felt that would be the behavior users desired. We’d have to ask someone that was working on the code at the time and/or look to see if there’s a closed bug/RFE/commit comment describing the change.

It would be possible to have a WebExtension which permitted creation of multiple bookmarks with the same URL. While it can not directly change the behavior of any of the browser bookmark UI, it could watch for changes to the bookmarks and make changes after others were made (e.g. watch for a bookmark move and add a duplicate in the old position for each move that’s not done through it’s own interface).

#4

Experimenting with FF 57, here is what I have found:

You can duplicate a bookmark by using Copy, Paste in the bookmark Library, or by dragging the bookmark with the mouse.

If you have multiple tabs open, you can choose “Bookmark All Tabs”. This creates a new folder with all the current tabs bookmarked. If some or all of these tabs are already bookmarked, the bookmarks are duplicated.

The star icon (which is the same as CTRL+D and Bookmarks --> Bookmark This Page) cannot be used to duplicate a bookmark.

  1. When the active tab shows a page that is not currently bookmarked, clicking the star icon opens the “Page Bookmarked” window, which allows you to select a folder. If you click Done (or hit ESC – is this a bug?) the bookmark is saved in the indicated folder.

  2. When the active tab shows a page that is currently bookmarked in a single location, clicking the star icon opens the “Edit This Bookmark” popup window, which displays the bookmark’s current folder. If you use this window to select a new folder, the bookmark moves from the old folder to the new one.

  3. When the active tab shows a page that is currently bookmarked in multiple locations, the star icon opens the “Edit This Bookmark” popup window, which displays one of the folders in which the bookmark exists. If you use this window to select a new location, the bookmark moves from displayed folder to the new one, but all other copies of the bookmark are unchanged. In other words, if the bookmark was previously in folders W,X,Y it will now be in folders W,X,Z: the total number of bookmarks will not change.

#5

BTW you can also use/add tags to bookmarks to organize them. Maybe that helps too.

1 Like
#6

I’m in here by mistake as I’m not a developer or anything of that paygrade.
but–here’s possble work around. say you put your fav bookmark in a folder and want it in a second folder as well.
first,open the bookmark from its orig place.
then, click a link within the newly opened page.
then bookmark this in another folder.
this may work esp well if the page requires a sign-in where you originally landed.
hth