ok, I have safari opening to all my favorites. how do I get this same page in firefox or brave?
You will have to do some labour yourself with this one. You cannot port your Safari start page customisation into Firefox or any other browser. They will be customised according to those companies' design choices.
Only thing you could do was import bookmarks, and that is what you have done.
That said, if you must have some favourites/ bookmarks pinned to Firefox start page, it is possible to do that in Firefox settings. Please open the Settings page in Firefox and go through that.
Also, you should make the effort to email Firefox that their documentation sucked and you could not see what you wanted to do in their documentation pages. You checked those pages, right?