Hi Brave team, after 4,5 years this bug is still NOT solved?
It’s a shame!
Then you have to find it yourself…
Just copy the error report from Jun 2016:
Jun 2019
2 / 3
Jun 2019
Jul '19
I’m attempting to import Firefox bookmarks into Brave using “Import bookmarks and settings.”
Brave gives me the following error: “Close Firefox >> To finish importing, close all Firefox windows. Try again. Cancel.” Try again still returns error.
But FF isn’t running and there’re no FF services in memory. I’ve rebooted without running FF and still get this error. I’ve cleared the Brave cache. Still no go.
If you didn’t get an answer it is because you are probably, like me, in a particular configuration of Firefox: your Firefox profiles are not in the default folder.
I had the same problem and I created an account earlier to say it, but I had an idea to solve it and… it worked! I’m sharing it with you. It’s a bit heavy to explain but in reality it’s very simple and fast.
The principle is to temporarily replace the Firefox profiles in a standard configuration. A lighter variant is to copy only the data files that are at the root of the Firefox profile folder.
Here is first the basic method, then a simpler logical variant and finally the paths to know:
BASIC METHOD:
1 - Targeted Firefox profiles are copied to the profiles folder on C:
2 - Then the file that lists and describes Firefox profiles (profiles.ini) must point to these new folders, so that Brave will read in the right place and retrieve the data. To do this, you launch the Firefox profile manager (which you must already use…) or you directly open the file “profiles.ini” in the notepad.
3 - Then you clean, deleting the files used.
LOGICAL VARIANT:
The same result can be obtained by using the default Firefox profile, already in place on C:, which avoids modifying the file that lists and describes Firefox profiles, “profiles.ini”. To do this, we ONLY replace the files that are at the root of this profile by the files that are at the root in the profile we are looking to recover. In this case Brave will be told to import from the default Firefox profile, he will find the data there. If you have to restore Firefox at the end you must obviously have made a backup of the replaced files! If we have other profiles to recover we replace new files from the root of the profile, etc.
This method is simpler because it avoids copying the entire profile folder, which can be very heavy if the cache has not been emptied and you do not touch the profiles.ini file of Firefox.
PATHS:
Firefox standard folder:
c:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\ , where “User” is your Windows user name.
Firefox profiles subfolder
Profiles\ (in the folder above)
This subfolder itself contains at least one subfolder whose name is a series of letters and numbers followed by “. default”. So you should see a folder that looks like : c:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxxxx.default
This is the default profile of Firefox, the one that is created at installation, “xxxxxxxxxx” is random.
File that lists and describes Firefox profiles
profiles.ini (also in the standard Firefox folder)
This file profiles.ini can be opened in the notepad and can be edited directly manually. As usual it is better to have made a backup before. So you must have a file like this:
c:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini
Its syntax is very simple. For each profile there are two possibilities depending on where it is located:
Either the profile is in the default folder, the path is relative and you will read something like:
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/xxxxxxxxxx.default
Either, the profile is not in the default folder (your case) the path is not relative but absolute (i.e. with the letter of the partition) and you will have something like:
Name=NAME_OF_YOUR_PROFILE
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\Firefox\FOLDER_OF_YOUR_PROFILE (or another location, of course)
If it still doesn’t work… There may be a problem with file access rights: this happens if the user names are different.