When you import the Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 bookmarks file to a system running Internet Explorer 7 or earlier, the following error occurs when you click Finish in the Import/Export Wizard.

Not a valid bookmark file

I could fully reproduce the problem in my Windows XP SP3 system running Internet Explorer 7. The source computer runs Windows Vista with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 installed. Thinking that this could be due to incorrect formatting or missing tags in the HTML file, I opened the file using Notepad but couldn’t find any errors in it. Eventually I spotted that this issue is caused by incorrect encoding used by Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 to create/write to bookmark.htm. With that said, the fix is very simple.

To resolve the problem, save the bookmarks file as ANSI text. To do so, use the following steps:

Start Notepad, and then open the bookmarks file (bookmark.htm)

Click Save As on the File menu.

In the Save As dialog box, click ANSI in the Encoding list, and then click Save.

Click Yes when prompted to overwrite the file.

You should be able to import the bookmark file successfully using the Import/Export Wizard in Internet Explorer.

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86 Comments

  1. BG
    said this on Sunday, February 15th 2009 10:36 am

    yup this works, thanks for the tip!

  2. egwells
    said this on Wednesday, February 4th 2009 5:03 pm

    Incredible! changing the file to ANSI format worked. Took less than 2 minutes to fix this problem after searching for days to get help
    THANK YOU!

  3. Michael C
    said this on Saturday, January 24th 2009 9:25 am

    Thank you, you are awesome.

  4. Prasad
    said this on Tuesday, January 6th 2009 11:06 am

    Thank you very much

  5. dliu
    said this on Friday, November 28th 2008 11:19 am

    My file also had additonal line at the top like stanley said. I deleted it and worked.
    thanks a lot.

  6. stanley
    said this on Tuesday, November 25th 2008 10:58 pm

    my file had additonal line at the top and did not work. i deleted it to match the example given at the top and worked great! thanks!

  7. Steve la
    said this on Tuesday, November 11th 2008 7:36 pm

    it worked like magic

  8. Kiran
    said this on Wednesday, October 22nd 2008 8:53 pm

    Hey, thank you very much. Its was very helpful.

  9. Daniel
    said this on Thursday, October 9th 2008 8:33 am

    Excellent. That worked.

  10. Rick Rahnenfuhrer
    said this on Saturday, October 4th 2008 11:32 am

    Wow so hard to find but so easy to fix. Thanks once again WinHelp Crew.

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