OK, so I thought I'd give K-Meleon a try and installed on an old laptop (HP EliteBook 8560w) running Windows 7 (Pro, 64-bit), which already had several otehr browsers on it.

When I went to use the default browser (IE10), I found that all my favorites -- hundreds of them -- now had a ".URL" at the end of them, and no longer worked as links.

Went to the "Favorites" folder in my profile, and all items now show as being type "K-Meleon HTML Document".

This is NOT good. None of the links work in IE, and none of them work in K-Meleon, either.

Why the hell would K-Meleon make changes in my other browsers??

I hope there's a way to get these bookmarks back.
If not, K-Meleon just did me damage that I may never be able to fully recover from.

Any suggestions?

TIA.

Doesn't that browser store a backup? Should do.

Did you inadvertantly make K-m the default browser?

But if no backup you can export your favorites as an html file, then open it in a text editor etc and use search and replace all to delete the .URL that has been added. Save, make a copy and reimport.

Also best to make a copy of exported html before editing.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/10/2018 01:02AM by Mello.

Hmm...

I tried editing out the .URL, and the links didn't work at all, in any browser.

I didn't think IE had a backup, but after I uninstalled K-Meleon, the links eventually restored themselves -- except all the icons in the Favorites display reverted to the generic IE icon.

Firefox is still showing all the links with the K-Meleon icon. I think Firefox has a backup of the bookmarks somewhere, but it has to be resinstalled manually. If I can find it . . . D-Meleon messed up my Opera links, too, but I only had a few of them, so no big loss there.


I did initially make K-Meleon the default browser, but I had no idea it was going to hijack the links from all my other browsers. No other browser I've ever installed has done anything like that.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/10/2018 02:24AM by Dr H.

Never heard anything like that, at least can't remember.
But am a few years behind due to my old versions and OS. Have hoped that more experienced people would show up, but oh well, so here my 2 cents:

K-Meleon can use 3 different bookmarking systems, whichever a user prefers, or even all three independently:
Bookmarks, Favorites or Opera Hotlist. The default system is "Bookmarks", the other two must be enabled by the user in the settings first.

The shared IE Favorites (in my era) have always been rock stable and downright indestructible. Simply because -unlike Bookmarks - they are not all tossed together into one giant file, which may be vulnerable, but instead every single "IE favorite" is an independant little file. A tiny plain text file by the way, can easily be inspected with a notepad (unless that was changed in recent years, sorry no idea).
Also, unlike the Bookmarks-file and the Opera Hotlist-file, which can either be imported or shared, K-Meleon does absolutely nothing with all those hundreds or thousands single IE Favorites files. They are not imported nor copied, only shared, that means not touched at all. KM simply reads their links and builds the menu. So I can't imagine that any mass damage can be done here.

What obviously happened is just some prob with definition of default actions, when setting KM as default browser, but that's not my area. And often newer Windows systems do weird tricks themselves, especially with portable apps. At any rate it's probably easy to fix that again.

"Bookmarks" and "Opera hotlist" work completely different.
They are in one huge file, and its path can be changed in Options or F2>KM Plugins.
Those huge files can either be shared with the original browsers, with Opera or (an old version) of Firefox, or can be manually copied for KM, using a file explorer. And then pointing to the copied path in the options.
The Firefox "Bookmarks" only work in the old html-format. If Firefox is a newer version, its bookmarks are stored in places.sqlite, which KM definitely doesn't import or touch or even know of.

PS: which KM-version did you install? And where downloaded? And is it a portable version with profiles inside or are the profiles in the systems user folder? (Path is found with Edit>Configuration>Profile Directory) And is it installed in very restricted c:/programs folder or outside?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/10/2018 03:22AM by siria.

@Dr H
Nothing really happened. Probably just one of the bad packages that use a really stupid script file to set up the default browser. Go to Control Panel / Internet Options / Programs to repair the broken IE registry keys. Then start Firefox to reset Firefox registry entries.

Always report K-Meleon package link and OS in requests!