Chrome for OS X is lacking a bookmark export feature. I’m sure it will have one in the future, but it doesn’t have it yet. It will happily import your mozilla bookmarks and let you get started using the browser, but eventually you will notice that your bookmarks are locked in. It only recently got a very rudimentary bookmark manager in the latest nightly builds, but there is still no export.
The Chrome bookmark file in OS X is a simple JSON database, so I whipped up a quick tool in Groovy to do the export. This was really a single-use project but I figured I would post the source and binaries in case someone else needs it.
Usage: java -jar ChromeExport.jar > mybookmarks.html
By default it will find the current user’s “Default” Chrome profile. Since Chrome doesn’t seem to have any UI for managing profiles, I don’t see why you’d have a different one.
Requirements to build/run:
* Groovy 1.6+
* Commons-Lang (for the StringEscapeUtils)
* json-simple (for the JSON parser)
Here is a link to the source: ChromeExport.groovy
Here is a link to the fully bundled binary (which probably breaks somebody’s license agreement somewhere, but compliance is not worth the annoyance): ChromeExport.jar
Enjoy! Let me know what you think, or if it works for you!
It works! Thank you so much for sharing this.
Works with a little bug. Once it went into a folder it didn’t get the bookmarks after the folder. But other then that it’s pretty sweet. Thanks
Hmmm! Could you give me a bit more detail about what happened? I’d like to fix the bug. :)
Worked like a charm and made my day! You’re the man, buddy! Thanks A LOT!
Thank you so much for this! Really stupid that it doesn’t have this in it already, but thanks for your time on making this, worked great.
Worked awesomely, thanks so much!
I am going to use it for getting Chrome bookmarks into LaunchBar :)
Small bug: it doesn’t handle unicode characters in the bookmark titles
As far as I can see, it exports in MacRoman. So I just added iconv –from-code=MACROMAN –to-code=UTF-8 “$bookmark_file” > “$bookmark_file.html” in my script :)