Launchy is the excellent task launcher for Windows that saves me searching through my start menu, desktop shortcuts, bookmarks and other places where I collect stuff on my PC. It’s the bookmark searching that’s tripped me up.
Here’s the problem: When I type a few letters into Launchy, it regularly comes up with a specific bookmark as the first suggestion, because the bookmark has a long-winded title that contains lots of words. Whenever I type a word that starts like one of those in the bookmark, Launchy thinks I want that bookmark. However, I don’t. In fact, that bookmark doesn’t even exist.
“Huh?” I hear you ask. That’s right, it doesn’t show up in either Firefox or IE bookmarks. I wouldn’t be complaining if it did – I’d just rename it to something more appropriate. So what to do? I put on my detective hat and got to work. Launchy uses a plugin called Weby for bookmark cataloguing. Telling Weby not to look at Firefox bookmarks fixes the problem, so it’s a Weby/Firefox problem. Through a series of steps, including uninstalling Launchy and making new profiles for Firefox, I found the cause of the problem: Firefox has legacy bookmark files.
Firefox 2 used an html file to store bookmarks in the profile. It’s called bookmarks.html (see what they did there?). Firefox 3+ uses an SQLite database to manage bookmarks, but keeps the HTML file hanging around in case you migrate back to FF2, or need some other kind of backwards compatibility. However, Firefox doesn’t update the bookmarks.html file unless you specifically tell it to do so using an about:config option (it’s not very efficient if you have lots of bookmarks).
Weby is very capable, and can read both the SQLite database and the bookmarks.html. I have no intention of reverting to Firefox 2, so I deleted each of the three bookmark html files in my Firefox profile, and Launchy is working flawlessly again.
Following instructions in the Launchy documentation file, I need to either set Firefox to export the bookmarks to html on exit:
Firefox 3: Note that by default, Firefox 3 stores bookmarks in a locked database that Launchy can’t access. To enable Launchy to scan your firefox bookmarks, please type "about:config" in your Firefox url bar, find the entry "browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML" and double click on it to set it to "true". Close that, and rebuild your Launchy index, and you should have your bookmarks.
