Posted on 09/18/2025 4:04:29 AM PDT by Paul R.
Importing bookmarks from Brave on my Win 10 Pro desktop machine to my new Win 11 Pro desktop is not working. Brave SAYS the import has been made, but, nothing shows up where the Favorites bar resides.
Or, at least Brave isn’t displaying it despite me making sure the “Show Bookmarks” button is on.
If I go to a website and then hit the button near the top of the Brave window to add a single bookmark, that works fine.
I used Notepad to take a peek at the file, and it looks ok to me - not that I’m an expert at evaluating HTML bookmark files. I closed Brave and fired it back up - no dice.
I’ve tried dropping the bookmarks file directly into the “Default” folder the bookmarks file regularly sits in - no dice. I’ve read suggestions on the web and tried them until my eyes are falling out.
What could be going on?
Yes. But from what it looks like if you copy them both over together it should work. Apparently the bookmarks have to also go along with their own respective favicon files.
I moved the favicons file over too - no luck. :-(
I guess I’ll try joining the Brave “Community” and ask around.
This is crazy - there has to be a reasonable way to pull the info. off a SSD or HD that is ok, and move Brave with it’s bookmarks intact to a new machine.
So the browser is looking at those files like it would a website. Each favicon for each bookmark link is a Java Script wrapper that holds a small image file, the metadata description you read then you hover over it, and a location link to the actual external URL being stored over in the bookmarks folder.
So it has to have the favicons to see first and they redirect to the actual external URL in the other folder... So moving both over together should work... If there doubles of the same it should ask you if you want to replace them or not.
Wow... Well if you do find the problem please let me know!
I tried to import brave bookmarks on one phone to a new phone using brave. No dice.
I think you mean “if you (I) find a solution”! But, will do. This is truly bizarre.
I seem to specialize in “weird” computer problems popping up!
“I seem to specialize in “weird” computer problems popping up!”
Lol, rest assured you are NOT unique in that aspect. I screw around and experiment with so much stuff I am getting myself in trouble all the time. I have my restore point app set for DAILY automatic captures... lol
I’ve joined the Brave “Community” forum, and am getting some advice from a “Browser Support” guy, but, so far, no luck...
I have made a copy of the bookmarks.html file as a text file so I can easily snag some of the more important links...
I have had to do that, it is a job to go and pull them all up and rebookmark them again... Man sorry to hear that mess.
Yeah, I’m old enough (and busy enough!) to realize this sort of thing eats up too much of my remaining life.
Yes, I’ve been a “troubleshooter” all my adult life, but this sort of thing goes a bit too far.
On the desktop of my new machine, I’ll plop a shortcut to link to that text file of bookmarks from the old machine, . The whole bookmarks “folder” organization is pretty good, so, I can just click the desktop icon when I need a web link, hunt through the “structured”* text and then when I’m finished with that web page, I’ll add it to the new bookmarks file building in the instance of Brave on my new desktop machine.
*If the hunting gets too tedious, I might be able to make it easier by dropping the text file into Wordpad or Libre Office and make an document easier to scan through — Just highlight folder and subfolder names in color/bold, or something like that. ~2.2 Mb of text will take a little while to go through, but, it’s not too horrendous...
I can also (hopefully!) import the favorites on this laptop to Brave on the new desktop, as probably 80+ % of it goes back to the importation of bookmarks to this laptop from the older desktop, a couple years ago. Among other things, that would mean most of the folder structure would move over too.
That (success or no) would narrow down where the problem is, too.
The guy on the Brave Community forum has so far been quite responsive, but just telling me to try what I posted there that I’ve already tried. (eye-roll)
I’m going to be honest, I really didn’t like Brave. I think they are selling a bill of goods about their security and script blocking. I had insecure 3rd party requests coming through that my current custom FF set up would not have let through.
And after I uninstalled it it still had control of my box. I had to wipe my Linux install and reload my OS to completely be rid of it. FF when properly set up with advanced settings and “NoScript” blocker is about as secure as you are going to ever get.
Not one of them keep you secure from them themselves, maybe 3rd parties, but not from the maker of the browser. They are going to always allow themselves data product collection to sell on the side no matter who it is, FF, Brave, Chromium, Librewolf, Waterfox, ALL of them collect for their own uses and profits. So to ever think you are secure from the browser itself spying is a lost cause.
About the only Browser that might be more secure is Safari. But that is apple and so far there have not been any successful stable ports to other Operating Systems yet. I wish they would port it and release it in it’s finished state for other Operating Systems.
Heh! The word “botched” applies assuming some of this is not intentional...
At least most parties seem to think Microsoft will not create another one of these situations soon, in this case where most reasonably well-capable Win 11 machines would not be upgradable to Win 12. After that, who knows, but, by then, assuming I don’t fall into dementia, I’ll be “with it” with Linux.
I can’t shed any light on your particular issue, but it’s not impossible that Microsoft is breaking its competitors’ software on purpose - again.
It turns out I successfully imported my Brave bookmarks from my laptop to my “new” Win 11 Pro desktop machine. That gets me the same bookmarks on the Win 11 Pro machine that I had on the old Win 10 Pro machine something over a year ago, plus some others... because the old Win 10 Pro desktop machine’s bookmarks were the source I imported to the laptop at that time.
That gets me most of the important bookmarks, but loses last year’s when I was on the Win 10 Pro machine. There were quite a few links saved regarding computer problem, and a LOT of “pages of interest” and “reference stuff”, so, I’ll have to try to hunt through the actual “up to date” (almost!) file off the Win 10 Pro desktop machine (which I saved a copy of as a text file) to find all those “lost links”. I’ll likely try converting it and my new file (on the Win 11 Pro desktop machine) into Libre Office odt files, where I think I can hunt down differences in the files reasonably efficiently, and I know I can pull text of links out easily.
I did add a lot of bookmarks to the Win 10 Pro desktop machine in the last year”+” — the bookmarks file I “should” be able to pull the from the Win 10 Pro machine is almost 0.7 Mb bigger than the bookmarks file on the laptop that I just imported to the Win 11 Pro desktop machine.
It appears “something” happened to the bookmarks file on the Win 10 Pro desktop machine, but, I have no clue what.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As for the rest, I suppose I might try FireFox again. In the past (10+ years ago?) it just felt too different to me from what I was used to, and some sites had problems with it. (To be fair, I find a few sites with pages Brave freezes video on. Like one of our local TV station’s radar loop.) But, granted, I was so busy with 1st work, and then care for my Dad when his health and mind started going south, that I didn’t play with FF extensively.
In the meantime, if nothing else, Brave kills off ads reliably when I want to play YouTube vids, esp. YT music vids, many of which that I like are very hard to find elsewhere.
In this case, it seems it’s more like Microsoft is breaking their old OS, and my Brave bookmarks somehow got caught up in it...
That is great! I guess some/most is better than none!
Well that browser issue is a whole project in itself. I will share what I have been using for a few years now and it is highly effective. I don’t know if you caught it but Brave for Linux sucks and I found it isn’t as secure as they claim. They themselves are collecting data as much or more than other browsers. And they do not block all of the scripts on a page, just the ad tracking, but I am sure they have made deals on the side to allow chosen scripts to hit you anyhow. What I really do not like is that they take liberty with your box and stuff NOT related to to just browsing. So they are not just collecting your internet use for themselves but they are collecting unrelated data from your machine too.
I have played with just about all of the browsers and I ended up going back to FireFox. And here is why... You can not only just set the security levels, but you can go in and make advanced detailed custom settings about every process it does. And I use a FF plugin called NoScript. NoScript blocks absolutely EVERYTHING by default. Then you have to go and “allow” just the two or three that will make the page work. But it is still blocking the sometimes 75 or more scripts on that page. It takes a little extra effort but WELL WELL worth that extra work. But we are not in Kansas anymore. Extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary solutions.
Noted - I’ve been too busy to try to delve into this bookmarks issue further, until, this morning, I imported the text file of the bookmarks from my old Win 10 Pro machine into Libre Office. (I had previously copied the contents of the bookmarks file into Notepad to create a simple text file version of it.)
Now I can use Libre Office’ “Find” function in “Find All” mode, and tell it to go find all instances of “url” or “name”. That helps pick them out. ...Out of all 7,923 / 846 pages of them...
Libre Office itself is doing odd things on this 11 Pro machine, but not on my wife’s. It keeps wanting to resize the Libre Office page such that everything above the top of the document itself runs off the top of the screen, and the position of the window locks up. Full screen does not help. What does help is to right click on a still open section of the Desktop, right click and go to “Personalize”, change a video setting such as resolution, but don’t keep that — let it revert. Then the view of Libre Office goes back to normal, all the stuff above the document (ruler, toolbar...) reappears in their normal positions, the window can be resized or dragged around normally, etc. This has not happened on any other application, and only the Libre Office window is affected. Weird. And quite annoying.
Maybe documents with so many pages are confusing Libre Office, but, that seems unlikely. (eye roll and shrug)
I do have an old CD with a legit copy of Word 2000 on it, somewhere... I may end up installing that, until I can get this latest gremlin figured out, but, it doesn’t help with any of my spreadsheet & data base files!
I will try to explain it as best as possible. Libreoffice was primarily designed for Linux. And when you get into Linux opensource code that you can edit every little detail you will find that the GUI part of apps are pretty much built like a website script. They GUI is a wrapper for the app which is actually a command line app. So because of this structure being similar to a website script you have a Template that controls actions, and a CSS file that controls all the colors, sizes, buttons, spacing, text & font sizes, and etc.
The CSS controls all the Graphics elements. And they use a standard language universal to all Linux GUI wrappers just like CSS is a fairly standard language for website scripts. So what is more likely is that for some reason your Microsoft coding is not rendering it correctly. Think of it like a browser looking at a website. If the browser isn’t seeing the graphics correctly it is not going to display the graphics correctly. I think MS has popped up with something new that now doesn’t see the Libre correctly.
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