Most browsers have an export button somewhere. Arc does not, and that is not a menu you have failed to find. Arc’s own help center says it plainly. There is no current option to export pinned or favorite tabs to another browser.
The reason is that Arc never had bookmarks. It has a sidebar of pinned tabs, sorted into Spaces, and the whole thing lives in one JSON file on your disk. Getting your links out means finding that file and running it through a converter, and the converters are free.
So this covers four things. Why the export you are looking for does not exist, and why the one page that looks like it does comes out empty. Where the sidebar file is on a Mac and on Windows. The tools that turn it into a bookmarks HTML file any browser can import. And what actually survives the trip, because pinned tabs, Spaces and Favorites do not all come across, and nothing on the first page of Google says so.
- Arc has no export button, officially. The help center’s answer is to put your tabs in a pinned folder and use Copy All Links. The
arc://bookmarkspage is Chromium’s bookmark manager and does not hold your sidebar. - Your whole sidebar is one file,
StorableSidebar.json. Mac:~/Library/Application Support/Arc/. Windows: under%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\TheBrowserCompany.Arc_*\LocalCache\Local\Arc. Copy it before anything else. - Free converters turn it into a bookmarks HTML file. Two open-source scripts, a browser-tab converter that uploads nothing, and a paid extension with a free tier. All read pinned tabs and folders, grouped by Space.
- Pinned tabs, folders and Spaces survive. Today tabs do not. Neither do split views, Easels, notes or Boosts. Favorites depend on the tool. Pin what you want to keep first.
- The file only holds what you pinned in Arc, so nothing you saved on X, Reddit or LinkedIn is in it. ContextBolt is the bookmark tool for that half. It saves any page in one click with its text, captures those social saves as you make them, and keeps the lot searchable together. Basic is free up to 150 bookmarks.
Why Arc has no export button
Arc is a Chromium browser, so it looks like it should behave like Chrome. On this one job it does not, and the difference is the whole search term.
Arc’s help center has an article called “Where are Bookmarks?”, and its first line is that Arc for desktop does not have bookmarks, it uses pinned tabs instead. A pinned tab sits at the top of a Space in the sidebar, can be dropped into a folder, and snaps back to its original URL when you click its icon. Functionally it is a bookmark. Structurally it is not one, and that is what bites here.
A second article, “How Do I Export my Pinned and Favorite Tabs in Arc to Another Browser?”, answers the question in its title with a no. There is no current option to export pinned or favorite tabs to another browser. The workaround it offers is manual. Add your pinned and favorite tabs to a pinned folder, right-click the folder, choose Copy All Links, and paste the list into a document to work from while you re-add each one by hand in the new browser.
That gives you a list of URLs. It does not give you a bookmarks file, it does not keep your folders, and it does not keep your Spaces. It is fine for a dozen links and useless for a sidebar you have been building for two years.
The empty page
If you typed arc://bookmarks into Arc, you found a bookmark manager with a three-dot menu and an Export bookmarks command, and a guide or two online will tell you that is the answer. It is Chromium’s bookmark manager, the same page Chrome shows at chrome://bookmarks, and it shows Chromium’s bookmark store.
Arc does not keep your sidebar there. Pinned tabs, Spaces and Favorites live in a separate file that Chromium’s bookmark code has never heard of. So the Export command on that page writes out whatever happened to reach the Chromium store, which is anything you added by hand through that page’s own Organize menu and not much else. If you opened it and found it empty, that is why. The page is real, the export works, and the file it writes is not your sidebar.
Where Arc keeps the sidebar file
Everything you see in the sidebar is written to a single JSON file called StorableSidebar.json. Spaces, pinned tabs, folders, titles, URLs, and the order you put them in. That file is the export, before any tool has touched it.
macOS ~/Library/Application Support/Arc/StorableSidebar.json
Windows %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\TheBrowserCompany.Arc_ttt1ap7aakyb4
\LocalCache\Local\Arc\StorableSidebar.jsonThe Windows path is the odd one, because Arc for Windows is a packaged app and keeps its data under Packages rather than a plain AppData folder. The _ttt1ap7aakyb4 suffix is the common one, but it can vary, so if that folder is not there, look for any folder starting TheBrowserCompany.Arc_ inside Packages. Both scripts below glob for it rather than trusting the suffix, and that is the right instinct.
Not the profile path
arc://version prints a Profile Path, and it is tempting to look there. That path is the Chromium profile, the User Data\Default folder, and the sidebar file is not inside it. It sits two levels up, in the Arc folder beside User Data. If you are hunting through Finder or Explorer, that is the folder to open.
Quit Arc before you copy the file. A running browser writes to it, and a copy taken mid-write can come back as half a JSON document that no converter will read.
Copy it somewhere outside the Arc folder and outside the machine, before you convert anything. The converted HTML is the useful file. The JSON is the complete one, and if a converter drops something, the JSON is where you go back to get it.
Four ways to turn it into a bookmarks file
The search results for this term are mostly one-purpose tools, and that is the correct shape for the answer. Arc left a gap and a handful of people filled it. These are the four routes worth knowing, from the official one that barely counts to the one that costs money.
| Route | Runs on | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copy All Links (Arc’s own answer) | Mac, Windows | A pasted list of URLs from one folder. No file, no folders, no Spaces. | Free |
| ivnvxd/arc-export | Mac, Windows, Python 3 | Bookmarks HTML, one folder per Space, pinned folders inside. | Free, open source |
| vrag99/arc-sidebar-export | Mac, Windows, Python 3 | Bookmarks HTML and a JSON copy, same structure. | Free, open source |
| ArcEscape extension | Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi | Bookmarks HTML with Spaces, pinned tabs and favorites. | Free to 3 folders, then $9.99 once |
The Python scripts are the ones to start with. ivnvxd/arc-export is the most-starred, at over 1,200, and it is one file. It reads StorableSidebar.json from the Arc folder on a Mac, or from the folder you run it in if you copied the file there, and writes a timestamped HTML file.
Run it
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ivnvxd/arc-export/main/main.py
python3 main.py -v -o arc-bookmarks.htmlIts README documents the Mac path only, but the code has a Windows branch that finds the Packages folder for you, so it runs on both. vrag99/arc-sidebar-export does the same job on both platforms and says so up front. Both need Python 3 and nothing else, and both leave the file on your disk.
The browser-tab converters do the same job without a terminal. xiaogliu/export-arc-bookmarks is a page you open, pick the JSON file into, and get an HTML file back from. Its README says every bookmark is handled in your browser and nothing is sent to a server, and the code is public if you want to check that. Its author also recorded one thing worth knowing, from a test in February 2025. Chrome and Safari imported only the first Space from its output, while Firefox took all of them. The workaround given is to import into Firefox, export from Firefox, and import that file into the browser you actually want. If your import lands one folder short, that is the first thing to try.
ArcEscape is the paid option, and the free tier is small. It is a Chrome extension that reads the file on your device, uploads nothing, and writes the HTML. Free covers up to three folders per export and 25 links per folder, and the full version is a one-time $9.99. It is the one tool here that says it carries Favorites as well as pinned tabs, which matters below. Prices read from arcescape.com on September 15, 2026.
What survives the move, and what does not
This is the section the tools’ own pages skip, and it is the one that decides whether you are happy on the far side.
A bookmarks HTML file has two kinds of thing in it, links and folders. Arc’s sidebar has more kinds of thing than that, so every converter has to decide what maps onto a link, what maps onto a folder, and what gets dropped. They all make roughly the same call.
| In Arc | In the HTML file |
|---|---|
| Pinned tabs | Yes. Each becomes a bookmark with its saved title and URL. |
| Folders | Yes, nesting kept. |
| Spaces | Become top-level folders named after the Space. |
| Favorites (the icons above the Spaces) | Depends on the tool. ArcEscape says yes. The two open-source scripts read pinned items only. |
| Today tabs (unpinned) | Skipped by the converters above. Pin them first if you want them. |
| Split views, Easels, notes, Boosts, archived tabs | Not links, so not in the file. |
Two of those rows do the damage.
Today tabs are not saved anywhere the tools look. The scripts split the sidebar into pinned and unpinned and walk the pinned half only. That is a sensible reading, because an unpinned tab is a tab you have open rather than a link you chose to keep. It also means the row of things you have been meaning to deal with, sitting in Today for a fortnight, is not in your export. Pin them before you run anything, or accept that they stay behind in the JSON and never reach the HTML.
Favorites are the row people forget to check. In Arc a Favorite is a pinned tab promoted to the icon strip above the Spaces, and it is stored separately from the pinned list of any one Space. Whether it comes across depends on whether the converter goes looking for that container. ArcEscape says it does. The open-source scripts describe themselves as pinned-tab exporters and do not mention Favorites. If your Favorites are your five most-used sites, the fix is trivial, because you can type five URLs. If they are forty, check the HTML file before you delete Arc.
One more thing that changes shape rather than disappearing. A Space in Arc is a whole context, with its own theme and its own set of pinned tabs. In the file it is a folder. That is the right translation, and it is also a demotion, because every browser you import into will show you a flat list of folders and none of the separation that made Spaces useful. Nothing to do about it. Just do not expect the new browser to feel like Arc.
Why now, and not next month
The demand for this term is a migration rather than a browsing habit, and it is worth being clear about what is and is not happening to Arc.
On May 26, 2025, The Browser Company published a letter to Arc members saying it is not actively developing the core product experience like it used to, that it does regular Chromium upgrades and fixes security vulnerabilities, and that it is not trying to shut Arc down. In September 2025 Atlassian agreed to buy the company, and the acquisition completed on October 21, 2025. The company’s new browser is Dia, and Dia is what gets built now.
So Arc works, it gets security patches, and nobody is adding to it. That is not an emergency. It is a reason not to leave the one copy of two years of curation inside a product with no roadmap. The JSON file is on your disk today. Copy it today, and convert it whenever you decide where you are going.
When the HTML file is the wrong tool
An export from Arc is the right answer to two jobs. Switching browsers, and keeping an offline copy of the sidebar you built. Do both. The file weighs nothing and the tools are free.
It is the wrong answer to the job most people think they are doing, which is keeping the things they decided were worth keeping.
Look at what you have pinned in Arc, then look at what you actually saved in the last month. The sidebar holds pages you deliberately pinned in one browser on one machine. It holds nothing you saved on X, nothing from Reddit and nothing from LinkedIn, and for a lot of people that is where most of the saving now happens. Each of those platforms hands you a list to scroll and not much else.
ContextBolt is built for that half. It saves any page in one click with its article text, captures your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves as you make them, tags and clusters everything into topics on arrival, and keeps it in one library with search that is instant and runs on your device. Basic is free, needs no account, and is capped at 150 bookmarks. Pro is $6 a month, removes the cap, adds cloud sync, and gives you an MCP endpoint so Claude or Cursor can search the whole collection by meaning mid-conversation.
It is a Chrome extension, and Arc runs Chrome extensions. Arc’s extensions documentation has you press Command-T on a Mac or Control-T on Windows and type Add Extension, or go to Extensions, then Add Extension, in the Arc menu. It installs in Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge and Brave the same way, which matters here, because the browser you move to next is not the point. The library comes with you either way.
None of this replaces the export, and it starts from your next save rather than importing an old sidebar. It covers the saving your sidebar was never going to see, and Basic is the place to start.
The honest take
Quit Arc, copy StorableSidebar.json somewhere safe, and you are protected before you have picked a tool. Everything after that is conversion, and conversion can wait.
Then run one of the scripts and open the HTML it writes. Count the folders against your Spaces, check Favorites made it, and look for the Today tabs you meant to pin. Import it into the new browser, and then export from that browser once, so the copy you keep going forward is in a format every browser reads without a converter. The full version of that job, including the duplicate folder you get on the far side, is in moving bookmarks between browsers, and the Vivaldi walkthrough is the closest sibling to this one. It is another Chromium browser that decided the export belonged somewhere you would not look. Arc just went one further and decided it belonged nowhere.
The wider point is one Arc makes without meaning to. It built what I think is the best sidebar any browser has shipped, kept it in a file no browser imports, and then stopped building. You get the data the browser chose to expose, in the shape it chose, for as long as the browser lasts. That is a fine deal for links you pinned on a laptop, once you have the file. It is a thin deal for everything else you save, which is most of it, and which is worth keeping somewhere that is not a feature of somebody’s browser. ContextBolt is that somewhere, free up to 150 bookmarks, and it keeps the text as well as the link.