Places is a system for storing bookmarks, history, and other user information about the Web, intended to improve developer access to this data and make it easier for people to Bookmark pages. Places is currently enabled for Firefox 3 and greater, powering History and Bookmarks, as well as providing plumbing for Livemarks, Annotations and Microsummaries and the Awesomebar.

Quick Links

Documentation

• Developer documentation on MDN
• Doxygen-generated API documentation
• Database schema ERD
• Places/Places_SQL_queries_best_practices for code contributors and internal developers
• Places/Places_Branch Places branch annotations
• Places/Coding_Style Places coding style

Communication:

• mozilla.dev.apps.firefox newsgroup
• #places on irc.mozilla.org
• Weekly meetings on Monday at 9am PST in #places. See Places/Status_Meetings for meeting notes.

Source:

• Firefox front-end code: mozilla/browser/components/places/
• Toolkit backend code: mozilla/toolkit/components/places/

Current work:

• See the Places:Plan for current work.

Active module peers:

• Dietrich Ayala (MO)
• Shawn Wilsher
• Marco Bonardo

Design

• Contemporary design information is on the Places developer wiki.
• Places:Design Overview contains much of the original design documentation from Firefox 2 and 3 work on Places.
• Places:Performance
• Places Security Review

Compatibility

As of Firefox 3, the APIs for accessing Bookmarks and History have been replaced. Some history APIs remain the same. See the Places developer wiki for more information.

Extensions

The APIs for accessing and manipulating Bookmarks and History have been replaced entirely in Firefox 3, and are incompatible. Almost all Bookmarks and History user interface components have been replaced or updated significantly. Any extension that does anything with History or Bookmarks will almost certainly have to be rewritten, at the very least to use the new APIs.

Timeline and History

• Initial Places implementation slated for Firefox 2. Landed for early alphas and then backed out and eventually cut from the release. [TODO: proper links and dates needed]
• Project re-initialized in fall 2007, slated for Firefox 3.
• History-on-Places was enabled on the trunk in January 2007, first released in Gran Paradiso Alpha 2.
• Bookmarks-on-Places was enabled in May 2007, first released in Gran Paradiso Alpha 5.

Credits

Past core contributors:

• Asaf Romano
• Neil Deakin
• Dan Mills
• Seth Spitzer

Help and guidance from:

• Brett Wilson (former back-end contributor)
• Myk Melez (microsummaries)
• Robert Sayre (feeds)
• Mike Connor
• Alex Faaborg

Discussion & Research

In-depth discussion is in the original design documents, linked from Places:Design Overview.

• Intelligent Bookmarking (Draft) - Robert Accettura
• The Evolution of Bookmarking -- Bookmarks, Firefox, del.icio.us, Tagging, and Information Management
• Automatically Organizing Bookmarks per Contents, Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, May 6-10, 1996, Paris, France. (Google Scholar search for the article if it moves)
• Deb Richardson's "On Tagging"

• Comments from Todd Agulnick of Foxmarks
  • blog post
  • newsgroup thread on sync
  • ERD (possibly obsolete)