Bookmarks Checker Add-on

[tb]

I am using Firefox ESR 45.3.0 on a Linux PC.

There used to be an add-on called Bookmarks Checker which did just like
what its name says: It would check each bookmark that I had saved and
flag those that were pointing to dead links, etc.

I cannot find Bookmarks Checker in the add-ons repository anymore. Is
there a similar add-on that you recommend?

Thanks.
--
tb

[Big Al]

Crudely FaviconReloader will try to download the favicon.ico files from
every site. Not meant to check validity of sites, but you do get error
messages on bad sites it can't reach. I don't have a lot of errors as
I used the other add-on earlier to clear most out, but use this one now.

[The Real Bev]

On 09/18/2016 01:11 PM, tb wrote:
> I am using Firefox ESR 45.3.0 on a Linux PC.
>
> There used to be an add-on called Bookmarks Checker which did just like
> what its name says: It would check each bookmark that I had saved and
> flag those that were pointing to dead links, etc.

I had that once. It took forever to chug through, and the marking
didn't survive a reboot. Most of what it found were just slightly
different from the current REAL URL and only required a bit of back- and
forward-tracking. NOT willing to do several hundred of these before
rebooting. Stupid extension.

> I cannot find Bookmarks Checker in the add-ons repository anymore. Is
> there a similar add-on that you recommend?

Good luck.


--
Cheers, Bev
"Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority."
-- U.S. Supreme Court, McIntyre v Ohio Elections,1995

[VanguardLH]

Back in Jan 2016, someone cited a link to it in the discussion at:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1106994

Looks like it got removed sometime after the release of Firefox 47. A
reviewer there noted that there are no dead bookmark checkers for
Firefox.

Firefox 47 release notes
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/47.0/releasenotes/
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/47.0.1/releasenotes/

Didn't see anything specific that would indicate a change that would
cripple dead bookmark checkers except the FUEL library got removed:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/07/compatibility-for-firefox-47/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Toolkit_API/FUEL

"Add-ons relying on it will stop working.". So maybe the addon used
that library and with it gone that addon became unusable without a
rewrite. Just a guess as to the addon's disappearance.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Toolkit_API/FUEL

So Fuel got deprecated back in v40 (released 2015-08-11) and removed in
v47 (released 2016-06-07). Extension developers using Fuel had only 10
months to do a rewrite.

I looked in the web archive and the latest captured copy they have of
that addon's page is at:

http://web.archive.org/web/20151114194455/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarks-checker/

That shows the addon's last update was in 2014-06-27. The author's last
update was a year before Mozilla announced Fuel was getting deprecated.
Looks like he never bothered to do a rewrite.

That archived page says the support forum is somewhere over at
http://fvdmedia.userecho.com/. FVD Media is the same maker as EverSync,
a bookmark sync tool (I just trialed them but they royally screwed up my
bookmark organization and created an equal set of duplicates). They
have a forum there for their Bookmarks Checker addon for Firefox at:

http://fvdmedia.userecho.com/lists/5-firefox-extensions/?category=58

There I found someone asking what happened to Bookmarks Checker at:

http://fvdmedia.userecho.com/topics/5490-what-did-happen-to-bookmarks-checker/

No company/developer response. That was 2 months ago when asked. When
I go to http://nimbusweb.co/ and click on "Our Products", there is a
navbar to switch between their product familys. Bookmarks Checker was
not listed there. I search on "bookmarks" in their blog site at
http://everhelperblog.com/. Nothing on Bookmarks Checker. Looks like
they abandoned it without any announcement.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarks-linkchecker/ is
still listed at Mozilla's addons site but it is old: last updated on
2007-04-19. So I suspect it is not compatible with the newer Bookmark
Manager in Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkchecker/ is another
choice but it is also quite dated: last updated on 2001-03-22.

So after looking, I cannot recommend any dead bookmarks cleanup add-on
for Firefox. I did find http://aignes.com/deadlink.htm which is an
external program (not an addon) but it is not supported and will not
remove any dead bookmarks that it finds. Apparently it will only tell
you which bookmarks are dead and then you have to manually delete the
dead ones using your web browser's bookmark manager.

[Lu Wei]

On 2016-9-19 5:58, VanguardLH wrote:
> ...

> So after looking, I cannot recommend any dead bookmarks cleanup add-on
> for Firefox. I did find http://aignes.com/deadlink.htm which is an
> external program (not an addon) but it is not supported and will not
> remove any dead bookmarks that it finds. Apparently it will only tell
> you which bookmarks are dead and then you have to manually delete the
> dead ones using your web browser's bookmark manager.
>

Thanks for you good survey. I hope there could be such a tool too.

--
Regards,
Lu Wei
PGP key ID: 0x A12F EF75 92CC E1EA

[»Q«]

In
<news:mailman.3435.147424441...@lists.mozilla.org>,

VanguardLH <V...@nguard.LH> wrote:

> I looked in the web archive and the latest captured copy they have of
> that addon's page is at:
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20151114194455/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarks-checker/
>
> That shows the addon's last update was in 2014-06-27.

I have a later version, 5.8.1. It doesn't work with current Firefox,
but I don't know when it stopped working.

[EE]

VanguardLH wrote:
> I looked in the web archive and the latest captured copy they have of
> that addon's page is at:
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20151114194455/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarks-checker/
>
> That shows the addon's last update was in 2014-06-27. The author's last
> update was a year before Mozilla announced Fuel was getting deprecated.
> Looks like he never bothered to do a rewrite.

I have that one and I use it with SeaMonkey. It is not quite as fast as
CheckPlaces used to be but much faster than CheckPlaces is now, with
newer versions of SeaMonkey. The whitelist did not survive in SM 2.45,
but it is still better than checking 900 bookmarks manually.

[B00ze]

+1 I use FavIconReloader in place of CheckPlaces; invalid sites are red
in the list, but would have to check - not sure if it only tries
bookmarks without favIcons or if it tries all of them...

Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain / B00...@hotmail.com
! (o o) Member:David-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo When I grow up, I wanna be like Riker! -Bashir

[VanguardLH]

B00ze wrote:

> +1 I use FavIconReloader in place of CheckPlaces; invalid sites are red
> in the list, but would have to check - not sure if it only tries
> bookmarks without favIcons or if it tries all of them...

What does FavIconReloader do with sites that don't provide a favicon.ico
file in the root directory of their web server? No site is required to
provide an icon. The file is optional. Won't this extension also mark
sites in red that don't have a favicon.ico file?

[Mark12547]

In article <mailman.3414.1474334751.18165.support-
fir...@lists.mozilla.org>, B00...@hotmail.com says...

> I use FavIconReloader in place of CheckPlaces; invalid sites are red
> in the list, but would have to check - not sure if it only tries
> bookmarks without favIcons or if it tries all of them...
>
>

FavIconReloader only looks at bookmarks without FavIcons. So if there is
a FavIcon from way back, this wouldn't detect that the site has since
disappeared.

Also, the red in the list could be that favicon.ico doesn't exist in the
root directory of the server the URL points to, or it could mean that
server doesn't exist or is temporarily down. For example,
forums.roku.com loads, but forums.roku.com/favicon.ico doesn't exit, so
FavIconReloader just shows the bookmark in red.

Actually, as of this writing, FavIconReloader does nothing; it doesn't
work in the e10 environment, such as the current Firefox release: 49.0
(just released this morning and my copy of Firefox updated via the
internal updater). See the "Caution:" paragraph at
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/faviconreloader/

It seems that several bookmark checkers have stopped being supported,
some because of changes in how Firefox stores the bookmarks, some
because of incompatibilities with e10 (Mozilla's move of Firefox to a
multitasking architecture).

After looking around, the best candidate I could find was AM-DeadLink:
http://www.aignes.com/deadlink.htm
which is no longer supported, but states that it can find dead links
within Firefox bookmarks, but warns that the actual deletion of the
bookmarks should be done within Firefox.

AM-DeadLink just may be worth a try.

On the other hand, it is possible that some bookmark checker may become
available in the future. For example, I found "Bookmark Checker" for
Chrome and it appears to work (and I cleaned up several bookmarks in
Chrome), so it wouldn't surprise me if that add-on gets ported for
Firefox.

But as of today, the choices seem to be either use the unsupported
AM-DeadLink or export the bookmarks as a html file and use a link
checker that can read html files.