Where a Mac browser keeps your bookmarks

The exact path, and how to open a hidden folder

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Bookmarks

The obstacle is that ~/Library — the Library folder inside your home folder, not the one at the top of the disk — is hidden by macOS. It will not appear in Finder no matter how far you scroll.

• In Finder, press ⇧⌘G, paste the path above, and press Return. This is the quickest route and works even though the folder is hidden.
• Or hold ⌥ (Option) while opening the Go menu in Finder. Library appears in the menu only while the key is held.
• Quit the browser before copying or editing the file. It is written while the browser runs, and a copy taken mid-write is a copy of half a file.

You will usually see two files side by side: Bookmarks, and Bookmarks.bak. The second is the previous version, rewritten each time the browser starts. It is a safety net measured in one launch, not a backup.

The same file in Brave, Arc, Edge and Vivaldi

All five browsers share the Chromium engine, and with it the bookmark format. The file has the same name and the same structure in each; only the folder differs.

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/

Chrome. Then the profile folder, then Bookmarks.

~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/

Brave. Note the two levels — BraveSoftware, then Brave-Browser.

~/Library/Application Support/Arc/User Data/

Arc. The extra User Data level is Arc’s own, and its bookmarks are not the whole story — see below.

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft Edge/

Edge. Edge calls them favourites in its interface, but the file on disk is still called Bookmarks.

~/Library/Application Support/Vivaldi/

Vivaldi. Identical layout to Chrome.

Safari and Firefox are the exceptions. Safari keeps a binary property list at ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist, and Firefox keeps its bookmarks inside places.sqlite in its profile folder. Neither is JSON, and neither can be read by anything expecting the Chromium format.

Why Arc is different, and what its Bookmarks file holds

Arc is the confusing one, and the confusion is genuine rather than yours. Arc’s own help centre has an article titled "Where are Bookmarks?" whose answer is that Arc does not really have them — it has pinned tabs, which live in the sidebar and behave differently.

Those pinned tabs are kept in a separate file, StorableSidebar.json, alongside spaces and folders. Meanwhile the ordinary Chromium Bookmarks file still exists in Arc’s profile folder, and it holds whatever was imported into Arc from another browser, plus anything saved through the standard bookmark commands.

So an Arc user can have links in two places. If you look at the Bookmarks file and find less than you expected, the rest are pinned tabs, and they are in the other file.

Which folder is yours when there are eight of them

Inside the browser folder you will find Default, and often Profile 1, Profile 2 and so on. Each is a separate browser profile with its own bookmarks. The names are not helpful: Default is not necessarily the one you use, and Profile 4 tells you nothing about whose it is.

The real names are in a file called Local State, one level up, in the profile.info_cache section. That is where the browser records that Profile 3 is the one you named "Work", and which account is signed into it.

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome
ls -d */ | while read p; do
  [ -f "$p/Bookmarks" ] && echo "$p"
done

A profile with no Bookmarks file has never had a bookmark saved in it, which is the quickest way to rule most of them out.

What is actually inside the file

It is plain JSON. At the top there is a roots object, holding bookmark_bar, other and synced — the bookmarks bar, the "other bookmarks" pile, and anything that arrived by sync. Each of those is a tree of nodes, and every node has a type of either folder or url.

{
  "type": "url",
  "name": "Pavo20 camera mount and antenna holder",
  "url": "https://makerworld.com/…",
  "date_added": "13396521600000000"
}

The field that catches everyone is date_added. It is not a Unix timestamp. Chromium counts microseconds since 1 January 1601 — the Windows epoch — so a value that looks like a date in the year 426,000 is correct and simply needs converting. Subtract 11,644,473,600 seconds after dividing by a million, and you have ordinary Unix time.

Everything else is straightforward, which is why this file is what any Mac app reads when it wants your bookmarks without asking you to export anything.