For a few dozen links it's genuinely fine, and most advice to replace it is premature. The problems are specific and they all show up at the same moment: when you have enough saves that you can't remember them all.
The bookmarks bar toggles with Ctrl+Shift+B / Cmd+Shift+B, which is also the answer to "my bookmarks bar disappeared" about half the time.
In the manager, the three-dot menu at the top right has Export bookmarks. You get one HTML file that any browser can import. Worth doing before a machine migration, and worth doing today if you've never done it.
Be clear about what that file is: titles and URLs. Not the pages. If a site goes offline, your export contains a name and a dead link.
Chrome keeps an automatic backup of the previous session next to the live file. If an update or a crash resets your bookmarks, that backup is usually still intact — but only for a few minutes, because Chrome overwrites it the first time it saves after starting.
Before any of that, if you're signed in, check another device. Sync often still has the set that vanished locally, and pulling it back from there is safer than editing files.
Then export to HTML. Relying on a single auto-backup that expires minutes after launch is not a backup strategy.
None of these are bugs. Chrome's manager does the job it was designed for in 2008 perfectly well. It just wasn't designed for what saving looks like now.
Zihin is built around those four gaps. It captures the text of what you save rather than just the link, so search works on content and on meaning instead of exact wording. It pulls Chrome bookmarks, X bookmarks and LinkedIn saved posts into one library. It tags automatically instead of asking you to file. And because it stores its own copy, an entry survives the original going offline.
It runs on any Chromium browser — Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc — and you can export the whole library as JSON whenever you want.
Free during beta · Export everything as JSON, any time