Some users are switching between Firefox and Internet Explorer on their computer depending on the task at hand. It is for instance essential for webmasters to check their websites in the most commonly used web browsers. I thought it would be nice to share bookmarks between Firefox and Internet Explorer to use the same bookmarks in both browsers. This can be done easily with the Firefox extension Plain old Favorites which adds the favorites from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The favorites menu is placed next to the bookmarks menu in Firefox.
Whenever a new bookmark is added to Internet Explorer it appears in Firefox as well. You can also add every website that you visit with Firefox to the favorites by adding that website using the new favorites menu instead of the bookmarks menu. We can enhance this method further by tweaking several settings.
First of, it does not make much sense to use a bookmarks and a favorites menu in Firefox. We can merge the bookmarks with the favorites first and then use simple css code to remove the bookmarks menu from Firefox. To do this we have to export the bookmarks from Firefox using the exports function in the bookmarks manager.
This saves a file bookmarks.html to your desktop. Open the Internet Explorer in the next step and click on File > Import and Export and choose to import favorites. Browse to and select the bookmarks.html file that has been saved in Firefox. Select a folder where you want to place the bookmarks in and complete the operation.
If you go back to Firefox you see that all the bookmarks are available in the Favorites menu as well.
To hide the Bookmarks menu you have to find the file userChrome.css. You can find it in your Firefox profile folder under chrome usually. If that file does not exist create it and add the following line to it:
#bookmarks-menu {display:none !important;}
This should hide the bookmarks menu after the next restart. If you remove that line again the bookmarks menu will be visible again.
One last thing that we have to deal with is that sites still get added to the bookmarks if you press the shortcut CTRL + D. We want to change that to add them to the Favorites with that command. To do that we need another extension called Keyconfig which can do this easily.
Start the extension from the Tools menu. Now remove the old entries Bookmark all Tabs and Bookmark this Page. After that add a new key that you call Favorites for example. Enter the following line in the Code field:
gPofUI.openAddToFavoritesDialog();
Last thing that needs to be done is to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. We want to add CTRL + D obviously and need to select our new named key in the main window of keyconfig and click in the white empty field below the table of keys. Press CTRL and D afterwards and that entry should appear as the new shortcut to add entries to our Favorites.
Whenever a new bookmark is added to Internet Explorer it appears in Firefox as well. You can also add every website that you visit with Firefox to the favorites by adding that website using the new favorites menu instead of the bookmarks menu. We can enhance this method further by tweaking several settings.
First of, it does not make much sense to use a bookmarks and a favorites menu in Firefox. We can merge the bookmarks with the favorites first and then use simple css code to remove the bookmarks menu from Firefox. To do this we have to export the bookmarks from Firefox using the exports function in the bookmarks manager.
This saves a file bookmarks.html to your desktop. Open the Internet Explorer in the next step and click on File > Import and Export and choose to import favorites. Browse to and select the bookmarks.html file that has been saved in Firefox. Select a folder where you want to place the bookmarks in and complete the operation.
If you go back to Firefox you see that all the bookmarks are available in the Favorites menu as well.
To hide the Bookmarks menu you have to find the file userChrome.css. You can find it in your Firefox profile folder under chrome usually. If that file does not exist create it and add the following line to it:
#bookmarks-menu {display:none !important;}
This should hide the bookmarks menu after the next restart. If you remove that line again the bookmarks menu will be visible again.
One last thing that we have to deal with is that sites still get added to the bookmarks if you press the shortcut CTRL + D. We want to change that to add them to the Favorites with that command. To do that we need another extension called Keyconfig which can do this easily.
Start the extension from the Tools menu. Now remove the old entries Bookmark all Tabs and Bookmark this Page. After that add a new key that you call Favorites for example. Enter the following line in the Code field:
gPofUI.openAddToFavoritesDialog();
Last thing that needs to be done is to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. We want to add CTRL + D obviously and need to select our new named key in the main window of keyconfig and click in the white empty field below the table of keys. Press CTRL and D afterwards and that entry should appear as the new shortcut to add entries to our Favorites.
