favoritesfile

Guide

Edge favorites — and the old IE ones

Microsoft Edge is built on Chromium now, so its favorites live in the same kind of file Chrome uses. The favorites you saved in Internet Explorer are somewhere else entirely — and on most Windows machines, they're still sitting there.

Where Edge keeps favorites

In a JSON file named Bookmarks — no extension — inside the profile folder. Edge calls them favorites in the interface and bookmarks in the file. Same thing.

Windows

C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Bookmarks

Win+R then %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default.

macOS

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft Edge/Default/Bookmarks

Multiple profiles mean Profile 1, Profile 2 and so on instead of Default. To skip the guesswork, open edge://version and read the Profile path row.

Next to it is Bookmarks.bak, a copy of how things looked at the end of your last session. If favorites vanished today, that file still has them — but Edge overwrites it every time it starts, so quit Edge first. The step-by-step recovery in the Chrome guide applies exactly, with the Edge paths above.

To export: Ctrl+Shift+O → the ⋯ menu → Export favorites.

The Internet Explorer favorites folder

IE never used a single file. Every favorite was its own tiny shortcut file, in a real Windows folder:

C:\Users\<you>\Favorites

Type %USERPROFILE%\Favorites into the Explorer address bar. Internet Explorer is long retired, but Windows still creates and keeps that folder, and on any machine that's been upgraded rather than wiped, the old favorites are usually intact — subfolders and all.

Each item is a .url file, which is just text:

[InternetShortcut]
URL=https://example.com/
IconIndex=0

Edge can import them: Settings → Import browser data → Microsoft Internet Explorer. If that option is gone from your build of Windows, or you want the favorites as a file rather than inside a browser, use this instead.

Turn a Favorites folder into bookmarks.html

Point this at your Favorites folder and it reads every .url file inside it, keeps the subfolder structure, and gives you a standard bookmarks file that any browser will import.

Folder selection needs a Chromium browser or Safari; Firefox can't read whole folders. If yours can't, select the .url files themselves with Ctrl+A inside the folder — the subfolder structure will be flattened, but nothing is lost.

What happened to old Edge?

The original Edge — the one that shipped with Windows 10 before the Chromium rebuild — stored favorites in a database file rather than a folder, and Microsoft's own migration moved them into the new Edge years ago. If you're chasing favorites from that era on a machine that's been through the upgrade, check the Chromium Bookmarks file above first: they're almost certainly already in it.

Once you've got them out

Old favorites are also the deadest favorites. A folder that's been carried through three Windows upgrades will be full of sites that shut down a decade ago. Run the file through the dead link checker before you import it anywhere, and the duplicate finder afterwards if you're merging it into a browser that already has bookmarks.

Related: Chrome · Firefox · Safari