This isn’t a new problem but is a recurring one, so far not resolved,
After a system ‘shutdown’ (a ‘normal’ one – no crash involved) and later ‘restart’ only 12 windows displayed in the ‘Window’ dropdown menu.
Tabli (tab manager extension) displayed all 29 windows (and their tabs) that had been open at the time of shutdown.
Once any window or tab is selected in Tabli’s menu, it will open and will then also appear in the Window dropdown.
Another way to get some of these ‘missing’ windows to display in the Window dropdown (the only way I’ve found within Brave itself to date):
The History dropdown displays ‘recently closed’ windows.
If any of those happen to be non-displaying windows, they also will open from a selection in this dropdown menu. However, this ‘solution’ isn’t able to restore any windows that were not among the ones that were ‘recently closed’ prior to the shutdown.
The main issue here is: Why don’t all of the windows that had been open when Brave was exited display following the restart?
Trying to keep this issue alive, at least long enough to get an explanation of what could be causing it.
I just quit and restarted Brave. At the time I ‘quit’ Brave, I had 33 windows and 178 tabs open, as reported by Tabli, the tab manager extension I use.
Following restart, only 8 windows displayed in the Brave’s ‘Window’ dropdown.
I checked the windows & tabs in Tabli’s dropdown and everything that was there when I quit Brave was still there.
The missing windows & tabs don’t repopulate in the Window dropdown until they are reopened in Tabli.
If I didn’t have Tabli running I don’t know how I would be able to see – or access! – the windows (& their tabs) that are missing from the Window dropdown.
If you are going to do that, then make sure you have Continue where you left off in brave://settings/ and then use the exit button at the menu: ☰ → exit, so all the windows and tabs will restore properly when you start browser.
Using the history submenu won’t work, since like you say, it will only display the last 8 elements that were recently closed, and the only way to restore them is by hitting ctrl+shift+T (whatever is on mac), because the information is in the sessions file in the User Data but not in the UI, so you blindly have to do that.
Thanks @anon57438784, but what you suggest in your first paragraph was exactly the situation when the issue occurred. It’s after a restart that the windows don’t restore properly.
i’m not sure what you mean about using the ‘exit’ button. I quit Brave using either the Brave dropdown menu (‘Quit’) or Cmd-q.
If ☰ refers to the ‘hamburger menu’ on the far upper right, mine doesn’t have an option to ‘exit’ (or ‘quit’).
Oh, I got a screenshot to see, yes, Exit on Windows is supposed to behave the smae as the command+Q Quit command. Maybe it is a bug or something, someone should have to test it but sessions should restore if you have the Continue where you left off enabled.
You can test it better with brave://quit/ or brave://restart/ and see if any of those restores the windows properly. I use Nightly, and it works fine here, I tested it and it was working here opened like 20 windows with 3 tabs each and all of them got restores fine.
If not you have to test disabling extensions like JimB1 says, and see which one is casing issues, if not you can always tag Mattches, who can test it since I know he has a mac and he can report the issue if exists.
Or even better you can start Brave with --user-data-dir= and assign some temporary directory, that will create a totally new user data in that folder, and then you can test it better without touching your normal user data, this way you can open many tabs and windows and see if restart or quit command works. If it does, then it has something to do with your profile, which you can then troubleshoot by disabling extensions and all that. If it works with a clean profile then it’s not Brave but something in your profile.
Thanks, @JimB1, I guess I will have to try those. I am only running one other extension (The Marvellous Suspender) because Tabli doesn’t suspend tabs and for one or two other features also missing from Tabli.
I don’t think I’ve ever had an extension turn out to be the cause of any issues I’ve had. It’s always seemed unlikely to me, since the developer would be receiving feedback from many users and would then fix them – or there would be many complaints about them not being fixed, such as happened with the original extension that became The Marvellous Suspender when the latter’s developer ‘took it over’.
I’ve wanted to go back to Release for a long time. But the fact that Brave’s bookmarks feature doesn’t allow filtering of duplicates would make an impossible mess (from an import), as I already have tons of them just in beta.
Yeah you do it from the terminal.
And what I meant by temporary is just add whatever path you want after the equals, to let Brave create a temporary directory in any place you want.
I really have no idea how MacOS works about the file structure, but on windows you do it like –user-data-dir=test in this case, it will create a folder test next to brave.exe (useful to fake the portable version), so you want something more specific, like –user-data-dir="%localappdata%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\TEMP User Data" and done, on windows you would find normal User Data folder and TEMP User Data next to it.
And you can even have both versions opened, you don’t need to close your normal Brave when testing this way, they work completely independent, that’s another reason why I like it.
@JimB1 Well… today I did a system restart and then relaunched Brave.
All windows displayed in the Window dropdown menu this time.
I didn’t do anything differently, didn’t disable any extensions.
In the past, to the best of my recollection, the ‘missing windows’ issue I posted about has happened every time.
So… I have no idea.