How does Google Chrome find the Firefox bookmarks?

I was using Firefox for long time and recently moved to Chrome. And after installing Chrome, when I opened it for the first time, it asks that "You have bookmarks in another browser. Want to import them?"

My question is: How does Chrome knows these bookmarks? Is that Firefox saves in the common place, where other Browser can make use it? If the answer is yes, then what is the reason to save them in a common place?

Please correct me, if I'm wrong!

Ant's

Posted 2011-03-29T12:11:19.867

Reputation: 1 328

Answers

Chrome can do this because the developers know where Firefox (and the other browsers) store their data. In exactly the same way the Firefox developers know where Chrome stores it's bookmarks.

There's no common location - just investigation by the developers of one browser of how the other browsers work.

ChrisF

Posted 2011-03-29T12:11:19.867

Reputation: 39 650

Similarly, it can grab bookmarks from IE, as the format for storing them is also known. – Rory Alsop – 2011-03-29T12:51:54.443

Now the question is,How does they know how IE works? Its not a open source right? Then how does they found out this? – Ant's – 2011-03-29T13:07:11.583

1@Anto - by checking in "obvious" places like "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer" or "C:\users..." for changes when new bookmarks etc are added. – ChrisF – 2011-03-29T13:09:55.450

you don't need sources to know where the bookmarks are stored @Anto – Sathyajith Bhat – 2011-03-29T13:10:06.743

@Chris: oh thats fine:) – Ant's – 2011-03-29T13:10:56.493

The bookmarks file is almost always called bookmarks.html or bookmarks.json or something equally obvious. Each browswer keeps a whole folder full of user-specific preferences - the profile - in a known place within each supported operating system. It isn't kept secret; in fact, browser writers generally publish that information so users can back up their profiles, or if necessary for troubleshooting, delete them.

JRobert

Posted 2011-03-29T12:11:19.867

Reputation: 6 128