It sounds like something may be going wrong with the underlying policy or bookmarks component.

+bartfab@ as a policy OWNERS. Do you know of any policy changes that may be have caused this?

+sky@ as bookmarks component OWNER. Did anything change in the bookmarks component in M58 that you're aware of?


Here is another product forum posts: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/fw3PBBpLxF0;context-place=topicsearchin/chrome/%22managed$20bookmarks%22

Based on the forum posts, the solution that has worked for folks is uninstalling updates then updating Chrome.

I suspect that uninstalling and then updating works because uninstalling clears all user data.

There is no policy to disallow placing Bookmarks in a particular directory. There are managed bookmarks, which are read-only, and there is a policy to disallow editing bookmarks altogether. There is no policy that prevents placing bookmarks in a particular place (unless that place are the managed bookmarks - nothing can be added there).

Any reason you can think of that a person would get managed bookmarks folder if they are on a consumer account?

Sorry, I should have read the entire discussion before responding. I see now in the screen shot that it really is managed bookmarks that confuses the user. Policy on Android comes from the Device Owner (DO) or Profile Owner (PO) app. It does not matter whether and what account you are logged in to. If your DO/PO is saying you get managed bookmarks, then you get managed bookmarks.

If you look at the screen, there doesn't seem to be a way for a user to choose a different destination for their bookmark either -- the UI is greyed out.

The device owner / profile owner apps would be user-visible installed applications? Who would configure these rules on the device?

Is there any way to see what the associated Device Owner/Profile Owner apps are?

If they navigated to chrome://policy, would that tell them anything?

You have to manually set a DO/PO. It cannot just appear on your device out of the blue.


The screen shot looks like someone trying to edit a managed bookmark. That is intentionally not allowed - managed bookmarks are read only.

I just tried this with Chrome M59. A manually added bookmark went into "Mobile bookmarks," not "managed bookmarks," as expected.

Settings app -> Security -> Device administrators.

There are several problems here:

1) This person is trying to add a wikipedia bookmark, not edit it, and that's the dialog they are getting
2) This is my mom's device. I bought it and set it up. There should definitely not be any policy applied to it. It's highly unlikely my mom configured a policy for herself. So I think we should consider a scenario where the policy was somehow applied without user's knowledge.

I'll have her check what's set in "device administrators".

Can you have her take a screen shot of the chrome://policy page in Chrome as well?

Android Device Manager is the only thing in device administrators. chrome://policy is empty. See attached screenshot.

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Then I really have no idea where the policy is coming from that is triggering this. Bernhard has the best insights here and he is already CC'd on the bug.

No idea. :-( Does the Managed Bookmarks folder show up in the bookmarks UI? What is in it?

There is no Managed Bookmarks folder in the bookmarks UI. Only "Mobile Bookmarks" and "Bookmarks bar"

Apparently this magically resolved itself in M-59 update. Since we don't have any leads I am going to close this bug.

I just had this happen on my personal device. Some investigation:

* The default folder to add a bookmark to comes from the shared preference "enhanced_bookmark_last_used_parent_folder". On my device that is 4162.
* In my Bookmarks file there is no folder with that ID. The biggest ID AFAICT is… 4161.

This makes me suspect that the last used folder was deleted, and then Chrome reused the ID for the managed bookmarks folder (even on non-managed devices: maybe it is always created but hidden if empty or something).

My device is still in that state if someone needs more information to investigate.

Very interesting, thanks for the repro. wWas this on a phone or a tablet (not sure it matters, just curious).


I'm tried to reproduce by:
1) Deleting a last-used folder from a different device. The folder wasn't removed locally.
2) Hard-coding the last used folder ID to a folder that never existed on my device. "Mobile bookmarks" was selected in the add bookmark dialog instaed
3) Hard-coding the last used folder ID to a removed folder.


I'm not sure how managed/partner bookmark IDs are assigned. Naively, I would have thought that we disallowed re-using bookmark IDs.


+wychen in case he knows anything relevant about partner bookmarks.