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I would like to transfer my Firefox mobile bookmarks to my desktop and would prefer doing it without using Firefox sync or any cloud-based extension.

Is there a way to export Firefox for Android bookmarks to an HTML file?

Andrew T.
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mhham
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4 Answers4

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As of 2019, Firefox for Android has no built-in support for exporting bookmarks.

However there are some workarounds/alternatives:

  1. According to the "Chosen Solution" on the Firefox Support Forum, use Firefox Sync for Android to transparently move bookmarks across devices.
  2. Find an add-on (like EverSync).
  3. If your phone is rooted, you can directly query your profile's database.
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I do not have enough reputation to add a comment to Paul Benedict's answer hence I am forced to add this "comment" as an answer...

Paul's "Workaround/alternative 1" (which links to the "Chosen Solution" on the Firefox Support Forum) suggests using "Firefox Sync for Android" (and yes, I do realise that the OP explicitly requested a solution that does not involve using Firefox Sync). This will NOT work as desired, because although you can sync your mobile bookmarks over to desktop firefox, Desktop Firefox's "Export Bookmarks to HTML" does NOT "export mobile bookmarks when exporting as HTML" (note that bug is almost 3 years old now).

For anyone who do not object to using Firefox Sync, either:

  1. sync from android to desktop, then export to .json, or
  2. sync from android to desktop, copy or move your bookmarks from "Mobile Bookmarks" to "Other Bookmarks, and then "Export Bookmarks to HTML".

HTH.

jaimet
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1

There is a workaround for this. It's not an out-of-box solution but if you really have that much of a problem connecting to Firefox sync (like I do), you can do this:

  1. Open Firefox for Android, tap the kabob for the drop-down menu, then tap bookmarks.
  2. A list of your bookmarks will now be on the screen, you can individually select all these bookmarks. Select the ones that you want to export.
  3. Once selected, tap the share button at the top. Then tap copy to clipboard. This will copy all the URLs of your selected bookmarks.
  4. Using an IDE for Android such as Acode, open a new file and save it as bookmarks.html, then insert this syntax:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <title>Bookmarks</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Bookmarks</h1>
  <ul>
    <li><a href="https://example.com/page1">Page 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="https://example.com/page2">Page 2</a></li>
    <li><a href="https://example.com/page3">Page 3</a></li>
    <!-- More bookmark entries go here -->
  </ul>
</body>
</html>
  1. Paste your list of URLs, wrap with the tag delimiters and other syntax indicated above. After the URL, in the placeholder text above (Page 1, Page 2, Page 3), this is the name for your bookmark, so insert whatever name you want as the title for that bookmark to appear when you import into another browser instance.
chameleonhash
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There is a way to export bookmarks to a file (not HTML, though) if that is enough for you ("you" being whoever ends up here from a search engine, as this question is already rather old). It might or might not be a practical solution depending on the amount of bookmarks that you have.

If you go to Bookmarks view in Firefox for Android (in my case the first item in the main menu), you can long-press on the first item to select it, and then proceed to selecting all of your bookmarks one by one. (I did not find a way to select all, so this is where "it might not be practical for you" comes in). You can then click the sharing button in the menu bar, and select a best fitting way of storing the bookmarks from the alternatives that are presented to you.

It's hard to be more precise here as the sharing alternatives depend on the apps you have on your phone, but I was able to simply store the text on the clipboard, and then paste it to a simple text file using an installed text editor. You might have other, more practical alternatives as well. With this method the bookmarks are "exported" as a simple list of URLs (plain links) so you will lose any meta data like bookmark names that you might have stored in Firefox.

J.Nieminen
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