Browser won’t open crashes immediately mac os Catalina

Browser Support Desktop Support
34

Glad that the folder is present. That is, your profile folder should be the one named Default, and I’d make a copy of the whole Default folder (drag to your Documents, maybe?) before doing anything else. Maybe two in different locations, just in case, if you have the room.

Once that’s done, see if the file Bookmarks is in there. If so, that’s the gold. Do a Get Info on it to see when it was created/modified and how big it is. The dates will give you an idea of whether it has what you want. To get it usable/readable isn’t too hard, especially if you have Chrome or another Chromium-based browser installed that is working okay. You can just replace the target browser’s bookmarks with the file from your Brave Default profile folder. If you have bookmarks you value in the target browser, then I’d create a new profile in that browser so you don’t lose the ones you want to save or download another browser as the target.

Example using Chrome:

  • This will erase Chrome’s bookmarks unless you create a new profile (see below for instructions on how to do that)

If you’ve not saved any bookmarks in Chrome, just have one Finder window with your Brave Default profile folder open (sorry for missing hyphens before)
~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/
and another open to the Chrome Default profile folder
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/
and drag the Bookmarks file into the Chrome/Default profile folder, telling Finder to replace the Chrome profile’s existing file, if any.

Creating a New Chrome Profile:

If you have bookmarks you want to preserve in Chrome, then we create a new profile from within Chrome first using the little icon in the upper right corner next to the Chrome menu (that’s the stack of three dots). Click the grey person outline, not the dots, and pull down to + Add

image
image375×533 41.7 KB

then in the subsequent window, name the new profile, select an icon for it, and click Add.
image
image807×639 137 KB

You should get a new Chrome window on top of the existing one, each representing one of the two profiles. Quit Chrome (probably have to hold Cmd-Q) and go to
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/
and find the new profile folder, which should be called Profile 1
image
Copy your Brave/Default/Bookmarks file into Chrome/Profile 1, open Chrome, and you should be able to see what’s in the “imported” Brave bookmarks file. You can switch between profiles using the same menu you used to get to add the new profile.

2 Likes