Brave works great for a while. Then at some point (maybe after several days of use), it’ll stop accepting downloads and uploads. The issue seems to be that it can’t interact with the macOS file system. If I click a website link to download something, nothing happens. If I click a link to upload something, nothing happens. If I go to Settings > Downloads > Change to change the download location, nothing happens (because that should bring up Finder, which I think is the issue—whenever the browser has to interact with the file system). I can upload files when a website lets me drag them from Finder onto the webpage; it just doesn’t work when I click upload and it’s supposed to open the file system window to choose the file.
When I quit the browser, it pops up a window asking “Downloads are in progress. Quit anyway?” I tried canceling, then going to Downloads and clearing everything. When I try to quit the browser, the “Downloads are in progress” pops up anyway. And, I can see on the app badge in the taskbar that there’s a number indicating those downloads.
When I restart the browser, the issue is fixed (for a few days, then it happens again—this has been going on for weeks or months).
Link to an open issue report at Brave GitHub that I think is related below. The issue was fixed by a Chromium release but since it is still open, this indicates to me that the issue may still be occurring for some users. If this issue is the same as yours, you may want to post a comment to let the dev team know this issue is still occurring. The dev team may not respond but, if they do, they may be able to provide additional information.
I don’t know anything about macOS. Brave support is usually off on the weekends but hopefully another community member with more knowledge can pop in and help.
Generic things you can test:
Does the behavior occur in a new private window?
Does the same behavior occur when you disable any extensions you have installed?
If you have any anti-virus software installed, try temporarily disabling.
Are you seeing any errors in devtools (Hamburger menu → More tools → Developer tools)
@mcmike2099 Checked the GitHub issue report and noticed you posted a comment. Saw that you were still on Brave version 1.42.88. The latest version is 1.43.89 according to https://brave-browser-downloads.s3.brave.com/. You should update to the latest version as this may solve the issue.
I should have mentioned this earlier. I just assumed (my bad) you probably had the latest update since your post was created a while back. Updating to the latest version will be the first thing requested in any response. If the problem is still occurring in the most recent version, you should post that information here and edit your comment on the GitHub issue report.
Sorry for not mentioning this in my first post! Take care.