After opening Brave following a system restart, a very large number of bookmarks folders appeared in the Bookmarks dropdown menu that had not been loaded prior to the restart.
I’m not sure what they are from – possibly a previously saved bookmark file, but I didn’t do anything to merge these bookmarks into the ones I’ve been using.
What could possibly have caused this to happen and how can I get rid of these bookmarks and get back to just those I had been using?
Thanks.
Brave v.1.69.168 Chromium: 128.0.6613.138 (Official Build) (x86_64)
Mac OS Catalina (v.10.15.7)
No sync. Just using a MacBook Pro.
Might be coincidence but that or something else has slowed the MBP to a crawl.
Extremely unusual following a system restart.
All the new bookmark folders that were pulled in are situated directly under the set of bookmarks that I had been using (i.e., in the Bookmarks dropdown menu).
Is the only solution going to be manually deleting all those bookmark folders?
They only way these bookmarks can be put there is if a user imports them, creates them, or Syncs them from another device.
I would go ahead and go to brave://bookmarks find the folder with those bookmarks, delete it, then reboot your system and check to see if they re-appear after rebooting.
Thanks. The bookmark folders look familiar enough that I can certainly believe I created them, but it must have been ages ago.
I didn’t import them and I only use the MacBook Pro so there is no additional device they could have been synced with.
The only prior action I took before this happened was a system (Mac OS) restart to see if that cleared the ‘strikeout’ issue (it didn’t).
The folders that were brought in are all under Bookmarks (top level), but as completely separate folders – i.e., they’re not aggregated and contained within any other bookmarks folder (e.g., the “Other bookmarks” folder). So there’s no option to mass-delete them in a single operation.
Since none of the three possible explanations you noted apply, it looks like some bizarre glitch occurred. I’m going to reboot because of the equally bizarre system slowdown that’s occurred following the prior reboot. I’ll follow up but I can’t see how bookmarks that got pulled in will get deleted from a reboot.
You can still bulk delete them by going to brave://bookmarks, then clicking Bookmarks (top level folder) on the left – all of the BM folders you want to delete should appear on the main page. Click the top one, hold Shift then click the very bottom one on the list to select all entries between those two. Then delete them.
OK. I created an export file just to be safe, since I don’t know where those bookmarks came from or what may have happened to the source (presumably, a stored bookmarks export file). I can see from the dates in the titles of some of the bookmarks that they’re years old.
I wasn’t aware you could do the standard ‘Click, Shift-click’ with bookmarks folders.
Thought it followed the model of having to empty a folder before it could be deleted, which would have required going one-by-one. Luckily, no.
Thanks again.
For MacOS users - a couple browser bookmarks tips:
A) Converting the ADD_DATE
Example bookmark in the exported bookmarks > “bookmarks.html” file:
<DT><A HREF="brave://settings/content/all" ADD_DATE="1739942757">BB All Sites</A>
In the MacOS Terminal.app window, enter the following command (for that date info):
date -r 1739942757
Result: Wed Feb 19 00:25:57 EST 2025
B) Accidental / unintentional sorting of the bookmarks
In a hurry or “fat finger problem” event, sometimes users hit a sort button in a menu of the browser’s Bookmarks Manager controls. The result can dramatically reorder the appearance of the bookmarks and subfolders of bookmarks.
That is one of the reasons why I have a routine for often exporting the bookmarks ← in order to preserve the order and protect againt some accidental re-sorting or mysterious event.