@BillW,
Glad you got it working and thank you @leon0402 – definitely was the formatting, that’s my bad.
You should be able to start the browser from the icons – did you pin it to the task bar?
Additionally (since you’re a command line aficionado now 
), you can start Brave from the command line by typing the very long command
brave-browser
If it launches from the terminal, you should be able to pin it to the task bar and use that shortcut to open it every time.