Has it ever happened to you that you have 2 firefox clients running on one computer, and you wanted to access your bookmarks from both clients? That is, one bookmarks file, shared by many Firefox instances? I did.

I was running Kubuntu, and Vista, and wanted my bookmarks to be available in both OS. I also wanted that, if I add an entry in Kubuntu, it should also be available in Vista. After some googling around, I found these steps. They allow you to set where you want the Bookmarks file to be stored, instead of just inside your Profiles folder.

Normally, under Windows, it'll be somewhere in Applications Data -> Mozilla, and under Kubuntu, it'll be hidden inside your Home folder. Maybe ~\.mozilla or something. Now, you do these steps, and you can have your bookmarks shared. I set Vista's bookmarks as the main file, and Kubuntu will access it as shared. Do these steps.. Oh I forgot.. with this technique, you can also share bookmarks between different browsers, not just Firefox. Eg. You might share bookmarks between KMeleon and Firefox.

1. Close Firefox.

2. Determine where your Bookmarks file is located. Under Vista: C:\Users\[username]\App Data (hidden folder) \ Roaming \ Mozilla \ Firefox \ Profiles \ [yourprofile] \ bookmarks.html

For Kubuntu, I think it's: ~\.mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[yourprofile]\bookmarks.html.

3. Re-open Firefox. In your address bar, type "about:config" without quotes. No http://www nothing. Just "about:config". Press Enter. You'll see a lot of lines. Don't panic. These are your complete firefox and extensions options. (Tip: Feel free to look around and see to what extent Firefox can be customized. Don't play around too much though. Change at your own risk.)

4. Right-click on one of the listings (any), and select New - String from the menu.

5. Type: "browser.bookmarks.file" and click on ok. No quotes again.

6. Next, type in the path of your Bookmarks file. Refer to step 2. Press ok.

7. Restart Firefox and it should have access to the file you pointed to in step 6. Now you can share bookmarks between different user profiles, and different OS.

I wonder if this trick will work if the file is located on a network.. Gotta try that! :P