Did you ever wish that you could have new Firefox profiles created with no default bookmarks? There are two simple changes you can make to your Firefox install to do this.

There are two types of bookmarks that Firefox creates by default, the regular bookmarks and the smart bookmarks. To get rid of the regular bookmarks, create a directory called “defaults/profile” in the browser subdirectory where the Firefox executable is located. For Firefox 20 and below, just create this directory in the same directory as the Firefox executable. In the directory, create a 0 length file called bookmarks.html. Now new profiles will not have the default bookmarks.

Even with this change, you’ll still get the smart bookmarks, like Most Visited, Recently Bookmarked and Recent Tags. If you want to prevent these from being created, you can simply set the preference “browser.places.smartBookmarksVersion” to -1. (It’s an integer preference.) This can done via the autoconfig or modifying default preferences.

Now any new profiles won’t have default bookmarks.