Firefox: Clearing “Recent Locations” in Bookmarks

Another day, another Firefox tip!

I’ve been using Firefox for years, and I’ve had one minor (but annoying) problem for a long time now: when you go to save a bookmark, there’s a handy list of previously used folders. That way you can quickly choose a folder to save the bookmark, rather than click through the entire folder hierarchy.

Firefox Bookmarks
Problem is, this list stopped updating about 5 years ago.  The issue followed me through several versions of Firefox, on both desktop and laptop. I could save a hundred bookmarks in some other folder, but this list of recent folders has looked exactly as shown above since 2016 or 2017. And it was super annoying, since I mostly only use bookmarks as a session-saving type system these days. I save each Firefox window in a folder called “Sessions”… which I always had to manually click to, since the folders shown above never updated.

But yes, there is a way to fix this:

1) Open a new tab in Firefox and enter “about: config” (without quotes) into the address bar. Click “Accept the Risk and Continue” when prompted.

2) Type (or paste) “devtools.chrome.enabled” into the search box, and when it appears, double-click it to change the value from FALSE to TRUE. Close the tab when done.

3) Click the hamburger menu in the upper-right of the window and click More Tools > Browser Console. A small window with a bunch of techo-gobbledygook will open:

Browser Console

4) Type (or paste) the following at the cursor on the bottom of this window:

await PlacesUtils.metadata.set(PlacesUIUtils.LAST_USED_FOLDERS_META_KEY,[]);

5) Restart Firefox. When you try to bookmark a page, the previous locations should now be empty, and will refill over time as you save to various folders.

2 Replies to “Firefox: Clearing “Recent Locations” in Bookmarks”

  1. Hi Jim. Just came across your blog whilst looking for the solution of speeding up Windows Explorer and you had it way back in 2014 or 16 I think. It is the folder customization that is hosing the directory display time. I reset everything on every folder to no customization and bingo explorer works again. There are approximately eleventy hundred other answers on the web and they are all wrong. So thanks for that. Also your tips as in the one above are interesting if not immediately applicable so keep em coming. All the best from Plymouth in the UK

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