Firefox and blank tags

This post was written 3 years 3 months 14 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

Firefox 3 is great. Particularly the new tag facility for bookmarks.

However, it would appear that this initial version is, possibly, a bit buggy. I say “possibly” because after reading some of the forums it would seem that these may not be bugs but intentionally done to “save the user from themselves”.

Let me explain.

This came about when I accidentally created an empty tag. I don’t know how, but I’ve recently found one way – delete it from the list of tags in the “Organise Bookmarks” window. Any shortcuts that had the tag in it will have it replaced with an empty one. This tag is then listed as “(no title)”. Now try and delete it. You can’t? No, and if you’re using Foxmarks, it will cause synchronisation to fail.

I looked for all sorts of solutions but, in the end, the easiest was simply to start again. And what I mean by that is to create a new Firefox profile, re-install all my search engines and plugins and then use Foxmarks to download all my bookmarks again from their server. Once done I deleted my original profile. It’s not neat but it works.

Anyway, it would appear that deleting tags generally can be a bit, erm, hit and miss. However, the suggestion is that this has been done on purpose to save the user from doing it by accident. Erm, yes. Ok. Doesn’t really make sense to me and I can only hope this issue gets fixed.

Why, for example, if I delete a tag is an empty one created for all those bookmarks that use it? Why isn’t the tag simply removed?

Maybe we’ll never know.