Microsoft Edge calls your bookmarks favorites, and it will hand you all of them in one HTML file. The export takes about four clicks. It works, it is free, and nothing about it has changed in years.
What almost nobody tells you is what that file actually holds. It is a list of links. Titles, addresses, the folders they sat in, and the date you added each one. Not the pages themselves.
So the export is a real backup of one specific thing, and it is not a backup of everything you saved in Edge. Microsoft proved that itself in June when it deleted an entire save surface. Here is the four-click procedure, where the file goes, what is inside it, and what walks away.
- Press Ctrl+Shift+O, click the three dots inside the favorites list, choose Export favorites. Edge writes one HTML file wherever you point it.
- The file is a list of links. Title, address, folder, add date and an embedded icon. Not the pages, and not a record of what you actually read.
- Collections is not in it, and Collections is gone. Microsoft removed the feature in Edge 149, released June 4, 2026.
- Neither is the saving you do outside Edge. ContextBolt is a Chrome extension that saves any page in one click and pulls in your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves, so the reading pile that never reaches a favorites file has somewhere of its own to live.
- To import, go to Settings, Profiles, Import browser data. Pick “Favorites or bookmarks HTML file” and point it at the file.
How do I export favorites from Microsoft Edge?
Three routes, one file. Pick whichever you remember.
- Keyboard. Press
Ctrl+Shift+Oon Windows, orCmd+Shift+Oon a Mac. - Address bar. Type
edge://favoritesand press Enter. - Menu. Click the three dots at the top right of Edge, then Favorites, then Manage favorites.
All three land you in the same place, the full favorites manager. Now the step that trips people up.
Click the three dots inside the favorites list, not the ones in the browser toolbar. The pane has its own More options menu, sitting near Add folder. That is where Export favorites lives. The toolbar menu you used to get here does not have it, which is why so many people conclude Edge cannot export at all.
Choose Export favorites, and Edge opens an ordinary Save dialog with a filename already filled in. There is no options screen, no checkboxes, no way to export one folder instead of all of them. It is all or nothing.
Where the file goes, and what it is called
Wherever you tell it. The dialog defaults to your Downloads folder, and Edge suggests a name built from the word favorites and today’s date, in this shape.
Default filename shape
favorites_9_3_26.htmlTwo things worth doing before you close the dialog.
Rename it. In six months, favorites_9_3_26.html in a folder of 400 downloads tells you nothing about which machine or which profile it came from. edge-favorites-work-laptop-2026-09-03.html costs four seconds and answers both.
Put it somewhere that is not the same machine. A favorites export sitting in Downloads on the laptop you are backing up is not a backup. It is a copy. Drag it to OneDrive, Dropbox, a USB stick, an email to yourself, anywhere that survives the machine dying. The wider version of this argument is in our guide to backing up your bookmarks properly.
Then open the file once. Double-click it and it renders in your browser as a plain list of links. If that list looks obviously short, you almost certainly exported a different Edge profile. Edge runs separate profiles for personal and work accounts and does not share favorites between them, so check the profile picture at the top right before you assume anything is missing.
What is actually inside the file
Open it in Notepad instead of a browser and you can see exactly what you were given. It is the Netscape Bookmark File Format, a format from 1990s Netscape Navigator that every browser still reads and writes because nobody has agreed on anything better.
Inside the export
<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>
<H1>Bookmarks</H1>
<DL><p>
<DT><H3 ADD_DATE="1740873600">Client work</H3>
<DL><p>
<DT><A HREF="https://example.com/" ADD_DATE="1740960000">Pricing</A>
<DT><A HREF="https://example.com/api" ADD_DATE="1741046400">API docs</A>
</DL><p>
</DL><p>A folder is an H3. A favorite is an A tag with an address and an add date. Nesting is just nested lists. That is the entire vocabulary, and it is why the file imports cleanly into Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Brave and everything else. Brave writes the identical file from its own menu, and the Brave export guide covers the sync trap that has no Edge equivalent.
One thing in there does surprise people, and it explains the file size. Chromium browsers, Edge among them, embed each site’s favicon directly into the file as base64 text. So a link that reads like one short line in your browser runs to about eight hundred characters in the source, and the icons add a few hundred kilobytes to a 400-favorite export.
With the icon
<DT><A HREF="https://example.com/" ADD_DATE="1740960000"
ICON="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSU...">Pricing</A>The format is more capable than the export uses. Microsoft’s own reference for the format defines LAST_VISIT and LAST_MODIFIED attributes on every link alongside ADD_DATE. Open your export and check whether yours carries them. It is worth two seconds of scrolling, because that is the difference between a list of links and a record of which links you actually used.
Edge itself does track that. Its live favorites file, the one we get to below, stores a date_last_used value on every single entry. The export is a subset of what the browser knows about your favorites, chosen for portability.
What the export leaves behind
Two things, and the first one is the reason this post exists.
Collections, now gone
This is the one that should change how you think about the export.
Edge had two separate places to save things. Favorites, the classic bookmark list. And Collections, the panel where you dragged pages, images and typed notes into named groups. The favorites export never included Collections. They were different features with different storage.
And Collections is now gone. Microsoft’s support page states it plainly, that Collections is no longer available from Microsoft Edge version 149, released on June 4, 2026. Adding new items stopped working several versions before that. Personal accounts were pointed at Bing Saves. Work and school accounts got an export.
There was a migration path, and it was lossy by design. Moving a collection to Favorites converted it into a folder and carried the web pages across. Microsoft’s own wording is that only saved web pages are moved, and that images, notes and other non-page items are not included. So the notes you typed under a link, which were the reason to use Collections rather than Favorites, were never going to make it into any HTML file.
If you are reading this in September 2026 and wondering where your collections went, that is where. Check Bing Saves on a personal account.
The pages themselves
An exported favorite is a bet that somebody else keeps a page online. The Pew Research Center studied a decade of the web and found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available by late 2023.
Run that against a favorites file you have been carrying since 2019 and a chunk of it is already pointing at nothing. The export moved the addresses perfectly. The addresses had stopped working. We wrote about what link rot does to an old bookmark folder separately, and the short version is that a saved link is a pointer, not a copy.
How to import favorites into Edge
The other direction is buried deeper, and it is not in the favorites manager at all.
- Click Settings and more, the three dots in the toolbar, then Settings.
- Open Profiles, then Import browser data.
- Under Other import locations, click Import browser data now.
- In the Import from dropdown, choose Favorites or bookmarks HTML file.
- Under Choose what to import, tick Favorites or bookmarks, then pick your file.
Microsoft documents this path, and it is the same one whether the file came from Edge, Chrome, Firefox or a bookmark manager that exports HTML.
Expect a new folder, not a merge. Edge drops imported favorites into a folder named for where they came from rather than blending them into your existing tree. That is the safe behavior and it is also how people end up with three copies of everything after two or three migrations. If you are moving between browsers rather than backing up, the cross-browser version of this job covers the duplicate problem in full.
Where Edge keeps the live favorites file
The export is a snapshot you asked for. The live file is the one Edge is writing to right now, and copying it is a faster backup than any menu.
Windows
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\BookmarksmacOS
~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft Edge/Default/BookmarksIt is called Bookmarks, with no file extension, and it is plain JSON. A second file named Bookmarks.bak sits beside it, holding the previous version.
Open it in a text editor and the structure is three roots. bookmark_bar is the strip under the address bar. other is everything filed elsewhere. synced is the mobile tree. Every entry underneath carries a guid, a name, a type, a date_added, a date_modified and a date_last_used.
That last field is the interesting one. Edge has been recording when you last opened each favorite, for every favorite you own. Nothing in the interface shows you that number, and the export does not carry it, but it is sitting in a JSON file on your disk right now. If you have ever wanted evidence for how many of your bookmarks you never touch, it is there.
Close Edge before you copy either file. A running browser writes to it, and a copy taken mid-write can come back malformed. If you are recovering rather than backing up, the cross-browser recovery guide walks the file-swap that gets deleted favorites back.
When the HTML file is the wrong tool
The export is correct for exactly two jobs. Moving to a new browser, and keeping an offline copy of your link list.
It is the wrong tool for the job most people are actually trying to do, which is keeping the things they found worth keeping. That is a different problem, and the gap is easy to see once you count.
A favorites file holds pages you deliberately filed in a browser. It holds nothing you saved on X, nothing you saved on Reddit, nothing you saved on LinkedIn, and nothing you read on your phone. For a lot of people that is most of what they save. Those platforms have no export worth the name, no search worth the name, and no way to hand any of it to an AI assistant.
That is the problem ContextBolt was built for. It is a Chrome extension, which means it installs in Edge too since Edge runs Chromium and accepts Chrome Web Store extensions. It saves any page in one click, and it captures your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves automatically as you make them. Everything lands in one library, gets tagged, and stays searchable. On Pro there is an MCP endpoint, so Claude and Cursor can search the whole thing by meaning rather than by keyword.
It does not replace your favorites file. It covers the four fifths of your saving that the favorites file was never going to see.
The honest take
Export your favorites. It takes four clicks, it costs nothing, and one day a profile will break and you will be glad the file exists.
Then stop calling it a backup of what you saved in Edge, because Microsoft has now demonstrated that it is not. Collections held pages, images and typed notes for six years. It was never in the export. In June it was switched off, and the migration path dropped the images and the notes on the way out.
The lesson is not that Microsoft did something unusual. It is that anything you save inside somebody else’s product is theirs to retire, and the export button only covers the parts they chose to make portable. Keep the file. Keep it somewhere else. And keep the saving that matters most somewhere that is not a browser feature.