Importing Years of Chrome Bookmarks Is the Real Test
Anyone can make one clean save look good in a demo. The honest test is dumping in a decade of accumulated bookmarks and seeing whether the thing still works.
What an import actually costs
Markwise takes a bulk import and processes it as a background job. Each URL gets fetched, its text extracted, summarised, tagged, and indexed. That is the same pipeline a single save runs, except now it runs a few thousand times.
At that volume the failure cases stop being edge cases and become the main event. Some fraction of those URLs point at sites that no longer exist. Some are slow enough to time out. Some block automated fetches outright, and some are behind a login you had in 2018. Dead links are a certainty at that age, not a risk.
An import that treats any of those as fatal will die about two hundred items in, every time.
Checkpointing is the whole feature
So the import records its progress as it goes. If the process dies partway through, it resumes from the last checkpoint rather than starting from zero or, worse, running the whole file again and silently duplicating everything you already have.
Failures retry on their own with backoff, since a lot of them are transient. What cannot be recovered gets recorded and skipped, and it does not block the rest of the queue. The job runs on a distributed queue rather than in the request that uploaded the file, so closing the tab does not cancel your import.
This is unglamorous work and it is the difference between a feature that demos and a feature that survives contact with a real export file.
The unsolved half
The genuinely hard part is not technical. A big import is mostly archaeology. Some of it is worth keeping, and a lot of it is a 2019 tab you never opened and never will.
Processing everything means your new library opens on day one already full of things you do not want, which is precisely the problem you were trying to leave behind. Auto-deleting anything is worse, because the tool does not know which dead-looking link is the one paper you actually need. I do not yet have a good answer for helping you decide which is which, and I am wary of any answer that guesses on your behalf.
If you moved bookmark tools recently: did you import everything, hand-pick, or declare bankruptcy and start empty?
Whichever you pick, Markwise will take the file.