Forum Discussion
Duplicate favorites bug in the latest version of Edge (81.0)
Hans Hallebeek wrote:it looks like Microsoft is making a mess of it all once again.
After the Windows 10 updates killing printers now it's time to give the users a new point of discussion.
Bookmarks are being duplicated but the worst of all is that the bookmark has the same name but not always the same content.
Someone at the developer team must have thrown in a randomizer, just for fun, to see what kind of a mess can be created, well i can tell you, it's great wow, keep it up then we'll all go back to Google Chrome or FireFox or whatever
Which Edge channel/version are you using that duplicated your favorites?
are you signed in with the same MSFT account on other Edge installations?
have you used "duplicate removal tool"?
What happens is that once in enable sync i get very old favorites inserted. No idea where they keep coming from. What i have tried:
1.Export my correct favorites to a file.
2.Delete the favorites on all computers
3.Use the option Reset synchronization (according to the help text this should delete my favorites in the cloud and disable sync on all devices)
4.Import my favorites from the backup file
5.Turn on synchronization again
After a while i get favorites from years ago back in to my browser!! It's driving me crazy...
- Spoiler
dennisspaan wrote:
Ever since my last post from almost a year ago i'm trying to really work with Edge and i'm still having trouble with favorites. I don't have duplicate favorites anymore but i can't get sync to work properly.
What happens is that once in enable sync i get very old favorites inserted. No idea where they keep coming from. What i have tried:
1.Export my correct favorites to a file.
2.Delete the favorites on all computers
3.Use the option Reset synchronization (according to the help text this should delete my favorites in the cloud and disable sync on all devices)
4.Import my favorites from the backup file
5.Turn on synchronization again
After a while i get favorites from years ago back in to my browser!! It's driving me crazy...Hi,
I have a method that I'm pretty sure will solve your problem, but depends if you really wanna do it.
first of all, you need to sign out of all Edge installations, on any device, and only keep 1 Edge installation connected to your Microsoft account.
after that, on all other devices, delete your Edge profile completely from Edge settings, and make a new offline profile.
once everything is taken care of, you will only have 1 Edge installation, connected to your online Microsoft account, and all other devices have no personal data (favorites, passwords, collections etc.) in them.
now in your main Edge installation, delete all favorites: edge://favorites/
(you can also use Reset sync instead, if you don't care about your passwords and other sync data)
check the status of sync from here: edge://sync-internals/
once you deleted everything (or chose to Reset sync), wait ~10 mins for sync to do its job, just to be on the safe side.
now import your correct favorites from file to the same Edge installation.
wait 10-15 mins, depending on the number of favorites you got and let sync do its job.
after that, restart Edge a couple of times, make sure to keep Edge open at least 20 seconds between each restart.
now sign out of Edge on your only installation, delete your profile in Edge, make a new profile and sign in to your Microsoft account.
check everything is correct, favorites are in place, no duplicate and no old favorites there.
if everything is okay, start signing in to your Microsoft account on other devices too.
- Hello and thanks for your elaborate guide. Since i had to perform steps on about 5 different PC's and also my phones it took me till now to finally do this.
So about 2 weeks ago i logged out of every edge browser on every device and cleared local data as instructed apart from the last one.
On my main machine i exported my favorites and opened up the HTML file in a program called 'AM-deadlink', this is a tool for scanning your favorites and finding dead links.
AM-deadlink says i have 4056 entries in my favorites file.
When i open edge://sync-internals/ it said i had 0 entries on the top row that says 'bookmarks'.
So i turned on sync (it had been off since i last posted in this thread) and after turning it on it said i had 11274 total entries and 9181 live entries.
How all these different numbers can be possible is not clear to me but it might be a clue when it comes to duplicate favorites.
Then i chose to reset sync and my browser was stuck for a long time and then threw a black screen at some point and i think about after 40 minutes it was done.
Then i started to delete favorites from edge://favorites/, every time deleting a couple of thousand and making screenshots of sync page and seeing the number go down.
Finally i had deleted all my favorites and the sync page keeps saying i have 4 bookmarks. Can't get rid of that, i guess it's normal.
Then i imported my old favorites again from the export file i had made.
Now the sync page said i had 4481 total entries and 4481 live entries.
Since AM-deadlink didn't allow me to easily delete dead favorites i installed an extension called 'Bookmarks clean up' and used that to get rid of dead and duplicate favorites so finally 3030 favs remained.
After enabling all other sync options (settings, extensions, etc) and waiting for a really long time i restarted Edge a couple of times and i exported my favorites again.
Now after enabling sync on all my devices again one by one all is still good two weeks later and i hope it will remain like this!