Google toolbar bookmarks with Firefox-2 on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04)

After upgrading to ubuntu hardy (8.04) and trying to use Firefox 3b5 for a couple of days. I’ve decided to go back to using the Firefox 2.* series for browsing the web, as a lot of the extensions that I use day to day still aren’t supported in ff 3b5. So, I installed firefox 2 with the following command;

$ sudo apt-get install firefox-2

After installing firefox 2, I then tried to install google toolbar and got an error that the toolbar couldn’t be installed, after searching around the web. The solution that worked for me was to shutdown Firefox 2 and remove the preferences directory using;

$ rm -rf ~/.mozilla

When I restarted Firefox I was now able to install google toolbar. Unfortunately, after installing it and signing in using my gmail account, I was unable to access my bookmarks as I was just getting “downloading bookmarks” displayed when trying to access Bookmarks on the toolbar. No problem I thought I’ll just restart Firefox and hopefully that will fix it. Alas, this didn’t fix it. A little while later and a lot of forum searching and I finally happened upon a solution that worked for me, it involved installing the libstdc++5 library;

$sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

Then starting Firefox and disabling the google toolbar extension, restarting firefox and then enabling google toolbar extension and hey presto everything worked as expected.