Reading the *.sqlite files stored in the firefox profile

Question

How would one go about reading the data in the *.sqlite files in one's profile?

Trying to read them with sqlite3 was unsuccessful.

$ sqlite3 
SQLite version 3.7.4
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> .load ./downloads.sqlite
Error: dlopen(./downloads.sqlite, 10): no suitable image found.  Did find:
 ./downloads.sqlite: unknown file type, first eight bytes: 0x53 0x51 0x4C 0x69 0x74 0x65 0x20 0x66
sqlite> .exit

Is this due to Firefox using an older version of sqlite? I am using Firefox v3.6.13

Answer 1

There's an SQLite plugin for FireFox which I think has an option to load the Firefox files directly.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager/

Answer 2

I think you tried the wrong sqlite3 command syntax. I copied sqlite3.exe into the same folder as downloads.sqlite and from there I executed

$ sqlite3 downloads.sqlite

But I'm not really working with it myself. I just verified that current SQLite versions 3.7 and above can work with Firefox 4.0 files.

For practical purposes sqlite-manger seems to be a good choice.