Export Vivaldi Bookmarks: The Manager, the File, and Mobile

Vivaldi will write every bookmark you own to a single HTML file, and the whole job is two clicks. The reason you are reading this is that both clicks happen somewhere you did not look.

Vivaldi is the browser that puts a setting behind every setting, so the instinct is to open the Bookmark Manager and hunt for the control. The manager has an Import button sitting in the top right of the page. It does not have an Export button anywhere. That gap is the whole search term.

So this covers three things. The menu the export actually lives in. The file Vivaldi is writing to on disk right now, which is the faster copy and the one worth having. And what happens on your phone, where Vivaldi does something no other browser in this family does, and then hits a wall it did not build.

How do I export bookmarks from Vivaldi?

The Bookmark Manager is the screen that holds every bookmark and folder you own. The export is not on it. Go to the Vivaldi menu instead.

On Windows and Linux that is the Vivaldi logo in the top-left corner. On a Mac it is the Vivaldi entry in the menu bar. From there, Vivaldi’s own import and export documentation gives the path as File, then Export Bookmarks. Vivaldi opens a save dialog and writes an HTML file.

There is nothing to configure. No folder picker, no checkbox for favicons, no choice of format. It is all of your bookmarks or none of them.

Open the file once

Double-click the saved file and it renders in any browser as a plain nested list of links. Five seconds tells you whether the export caught the tree you expected. If it looks short, you are probably in a second profile, and the section below tells you how to check which one.

Why the export is not where the import is

This is worth a section, because the answer is not “Vivaldi forgot” and knowing the shape of it saves you the next hunt too.

Vivaldi documents six ways into the Bookmark Manager. Start Page then Bookmarks. Ctrl+B, or ⌃⌘B on a Mac. Typing Bookmarks into Quick Commands. The Vivaldi menu, then Bookmarks, then Bookmarks. Typing vivaldi://bookmarks in the address field. Or a mouse gesture you make yourself.

Six routes to a screen, and none of them ends at an export button.

Import is in the manager. The same documentation puts it plainly: click the Import button in the top right of the page. That is a real button in the corner where a real Export button would sit.

Export is in the File menu. Along with Export Passwords, Export Notes and Export Reading List, which are three commands most people never find either.

So the two halves of the same job were filed in two different places, and one of them was filed where you are already standing. That is not a bug and it is not going to be fixed by hunting harder. It is a layout decision, and the fix is to stop looking in the manager.

The ten-second version of that fix is Quick Commands. Vivaldi’s command palette will run Export Bookmarks by name, so you never need to remember which menu it landed in. Failing that, the File menu is two clicks from wherever you are.

Where Vivaldi keeps the live bookmarks file

The export is one copy. The file Vivaldi is writing to as you browse is another, and grabbing it takes less time than opening a menu.

Vivaldi stores bookmarks in a file named Bookmarks, with no extension, inside your profile folder. The default locations Vivaldi publishes are:

Windows  C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\User Data\Default
macOS    /Users/<you>/Library/Application Support/Vivaldi/Default
Linux    /home/<you>/.config/vivaldi/Default

Read the path

Those are defaults. Vivaldi’s own reset instructions tell you to open vivaldi://about and note the directory listed under Profile Path, and that is better advice than any hardcoded path.

The folder moves if you run a snapshot build, which uses Vivaldi Snapshot instead. It moves again if you have ever made a second user profile, which Vivaldi encourages more than most browsers do. The browser knows the answer for the profile you are actually in. A guide written two years ago does not.

Close Vivaldi before you copy that file. A running browser writes to it, and a copy taken mid-write can come back malformed.

That file is JSON rather than HTML, so it is not something another browser will import directly. If you have one and want the importable version, our free Chrome bookmarks restore tool reads the Chromium Bookmarks format, Vivaldi’s included, and turns it back into a bookmarks.html file in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

One thing neither copy gives you back is something you already deleted and then emptied. Deleted bookmarks go to a Trash folder in the Bookmark Manager, and you restore one by dragging it out. Right-click the folder and choose Empty Trash and that safety net is gone, which is why recovering deleted bookmarks gets harder the longer you keep browsing after the mistake.

Notes and Reading List have their own exports

This is the part that catches people who moved to Vivaldi because it does more than a browser normally does.

Vivaldi has a Notes feature and a Reading List, and both are places you save things. Neither is a bookmark. The HTML bookmarks file is a link format, so it carries titles, URLs and your folder tree, and it has nowhere to put a note you typed.

Vivaldi’s answer is three more commands in the same File menu, under Export. Export Notes writes text or markdown files. Export Reading List writes a CSV. Export Passwords writes a CSV, with the warning Vivaldi attaches to it, which is that anyone who opens that file can read every password in it.

The useful thing here is what the menu tells you by existing. A browser does not build a separate export for data that is already inside another export. If you keep real material in Notes or in the Reading List, one bookmarks file is not your backup, and you will not find out until you go looking for something that was never in it.

Vivaldi on mobile: Android exports, iPhone does not

Most guides to this stop at the desktop. The mobile answer is the more interesting half, and it splits.

On Android, Vivaldi gives you a real export. Open the Bookmarks Panel, tap the three-dot menu in the top right of the panel, and choose Export Bookmarks. Import sits in the same menu and takes an HTML file. That is genuinely rare. Most phone browsers offer no file in either direction, so a set of bookmarks made on a phone lives and dies inside that app.

On iPhone and iPad it is not there. Vivaldi’s iOS bookmarks documentation covers adding, editing, folders, nicknames, sorting and restoring deleted bookmarks. The word export does not appear on it. The same page says it is not possible to import bookmarks directly from another browser app on a mobile device, and points you at Sync with the same Vivaldi account instead.

Not Vivaldi’s wall

Vivaldi wrote about this in March 2024, in a post called “Why you can’t move bookmarks from one browser to another on iOS/Android”. The reason is application sandboxing. Every app on a phone runs inside its own walled-off space, which is the right call for security and is why one app cannot reach into another app’s files. Android’s own security documentation puts it flatly: by default, apps cannot interact with each other, and an app trying to read another app’s data is stopped by the kernel.

Vivaldi’s position in that post is that you should be able to move your data between services and apps, that it makes this work on desktop, and that the mobile version of the problem needs the industry and regulators rather than a browser vendor’s own fix.

Which leaves you with one practical rule. If your bookmarks matter, they need to exist on a desktop at some point. Sync them off the phone to a computer running Vivaldi, then export from there. The generic version of that move, including the duplicate folders you get on the far side, is in moving bookmarks between browsers.

When the HTML file is the wrong tool

The export is right for two jobs. Switching browsers, and keeping an offline copy of your link list. Do both. They cost nothing and one day one of them will be the reason you stay calm.

It is the wrong tool for the job most people think they are doing, which is keeping the things they decided were worth keeping.

Open your Vivaldi bookmarks and compare them against everything you actually saved in the last month. A bookmarks file holds pages you deliberately starred in one browser on one machine. It holds nothing you saved on X, nothing from Reddit, nothing from LinkedIn, and nothing you tapped save on while reading in bed. For most people that is now where the majority of saving happens, and none of those platforms gives you an export, a search worth using, or any way to hand the pile to an AI assistant.

ContextBolt is built for that half. It saves any page in one click, picks up your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves automatically as you make them, tags everything, and keeps it in one searchable library. The free Basic tier shows your 150 most recent saves. Pro is $6 a month for unlimited saves, cloud sync, and an MCP endpoint, so Claude or Cursor can search the whole collection by meaning instead of by keyword.

It is a Chrome extension, and Vivaldi runs Chrome extensions with no extra step. Vivaldi’s extensions documentation tells you to browse to the Chrome Web Store, find what you want, and click Add to Vivaldi. If that button is not there, the same page says to turn on Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Google Extensions, then Web Store. Opera makes you fetch a separate add-on first; Vivaldi just relabels the button.

None of this replaces your bookmarks file. It covers the saving your bookmarks file was never going to see.

The honest take

Export your bookmarks today. Vivaldi menu, File, Export Bookmarks, and you are done before you have finished reading this sentence.

Then move the file off the machine. An export sitting in Downloads on the laptop you are protecting is a copy, not a backup. The full version of that job across every browser you use is in backing up your bookmarks, and the Opera walkthrough is the closest sibling to this one, for the same reason: another Chromium browser that decided the export button belonged somewhere unexpected.

The wider point is one Vivaldi makes twice over without meaning to. It gives you more exports than any browser in this family, four of them, and it still hides the one everybody wants. Then on iOS it gives you none, because the platform said so. You get what the browser chose to expose, in the place it chose to put it, on the device the platform allowed. That is a fine deal for links you starred on a laptop. 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.