Bookmarks vs Favorites - What Is the Difference?

Bookmarks and favorites are, for almost every purpose, the same thing: saved links to pages you want to find again. The reason you see two words is that different browsers chose different labels for the identical feature. There is one small exception in Safari, which we will get to. Knowing this clears up most of the confusion, especially when you move between browsers.

Same feature, different name

A bookmark and a favorite both do one job: store the address of a page so you can reopen it later without retyping or re-searching. Click a star or a save command, the link goes into a list, and you open it from that list whenever you like. Nothing about that workflow changes based on which word your browser uses.

The naming split is mostly historical. Early Netscape used "bookmarks," early Internet Explorer used "favorites," and each later browser inherited one tradition or the other.

Which browser uses which word

Here is the quick map, current as of 2026:

So if your browser says "favorites," you are most likely on Edge. If it says "bookmarks," you are on Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. The button you press to save a page is the same idea in every one of them.

The Safari twist

Safari is the one place where both words appear and actually mean different things. In Safari:

• Bookmarks is the full collection of everything you have saved.
• Favorites is a smaller, curated set that appears on the Safari start page and on the Favorites bar for one-tap access.

In other words, Safari's Favorites are a hand-picked subset of its Bookmarks. This is closest to how Chrome users think of the bookmarks bar: a short list of go-to pages pulled out of a much larger saved collection.

Do the files transfer between them?

Yes, and this is the practical payoff of the names being cosmetic. Every major browser reads and writes the same HTML bookmark file. Export your "favorites" from Edge and the result is an HTML file; import that file into Chrome and the entries become "bookmarks." No conversion step, no lost links. The label on screen flips, but the saved pages are identical.

If you are moving between browsers, these guides cover the export side:

• How to export bookmarks from Edge (favorites to a file)
• How to export bookmarks from Safari
• How to import bookmarks into Chrome (the receiving end)

A note on "Google Bookmarks"

One more term causes confusion. There was once a separate service called Google Bookmarks, a web app distinct from the bookmarks built into Chrome. It was discontinued on September 30, 2021. So if you read older articles mentioning Google Bookmarks as its own product, that service is gone. The bookmarks you save in Chrome today are a feature of the browser, synced through your Google account rather than through any standalone bookmarks site.

What this means for you

Whichever word your browser shows, the feature is the same, and the saved links move cleanly from one browser to another. The thing the wording does not change is the risk: a saved link, by any name, lives in one browser and can vanish if that browser or its profile is reset. Keeping an independent copy is the same good idea regardless of the label. TrueBookmark is a Chrome extension that backs up your bookmarks on the desktop when you install it, on demand in one click, and automatically before any risky change, so a reset is recoverable, but the takeaway here is simpler: bookmarks and favorites are two names for the pages you have chosen to keep.