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.