Question

While it’s simple to pin/block a link-screenshot in the new beautiful tab page in firefox I see no way to edit the list of blocked/pinned items, does anybody know how to do it?
E.G. I blocked a page but now I woukld like to unlock, how to do it?
Thanks.

Answer 1

This is for FF17 on Windows, Mac/Linux users cf below

To unlock a blocked page quit Firefox, download sqlitebrowser at sourceforge.net (~6MB as of now, Windows only), use it to open chromeappsstore.sqlite in your “Profiles” directory. On Win Vista that’s eg:

[DRIVENAME]:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\
Firefox\Profiles\[ALPHANUMERICSTRING].default\chromeappsstore.sqlite

Switch to the “browse data” tab, open the edit view of the value corresponding to the “pinned links” key (double click on it). Replace one entry (eg a null) with

{"url":"YOUR_URL","title":"YOUR_TITLE"}

apply changes, save changes.

There’s a key “blocked links”, too. Intuitively, deleting blocked urls from its value should help, but it didn’t when I tried. The trick above is clumsy, but so far I couldn’t google anything more elegant. I couldn’t find anything useful searching Firefox’ about:config tab, either. I found this solution when doing a string search for the blocked url in my profiles directory.

Mac/Linux users should find other sqlite browsers. When using the firefox addon SQLite Manager you would need to make a copy of the database file first and edit that. Afterwards quit Firefox and replace the old file with the new one.

Here’s the bugzilla entry (“Bug 722234 – [New Tab Page] provide an option to undo remove a site “), status is assigned, not solved. On comment reads: “Currently, there is now way to undo removal of a site or resetting the page using the new layout.”