Aggregate Topic: Outdated Brave crashing on YouTube

Browser Support
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My attempt at an aggregate solution post.
This is affecting ALL OSs with older Brave browser versions. Win 7/8.1 are hard-locked to a certain version, which this impacts the most. The “why” is due to the following:

  • There’s a part of Brave that still updates in the background brave://components. This is what handles stuff like the Shields (and why it continues to work with blocking ads/trackers even in older versions). In an unspecific explanation, it’s how the shields interact with google/youtube that’s causing this.
  • I don’t know how to shut this off or roll it back, though I don’t think there IS any way to do that. So we’ll have to wait for someone knowledgeable to chime in.

Webinstaller doesn’t support older OSs like Win 7/8.1 (I don’t know the OS number for Mac). The version you might be looking for is this one:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.46.134

A fix was posted down below for a fix to prevent the instant crashing by dumpydonkey (remember to give 'em a heart!):

  1. Go to brave://settings/content/braveShields
    Or Settings > Privacy and security > Site and Shields Settings > Shields status
  2. Click Add, and enter https://www.youtube.com, and click the Add button
  3. Refresh the page to make sure the changes apply.

The above worked for me to add the shields and disable them. I don’t know if there’s going to be another site that will cause a crash but I’ll keep this updated if so.
Unfortunately you’ll need to disable shields and use a separate adblocker extension like uBlock Origin.

  1. Go to brave://settings/shields
  2. Trackers & ads blocking → disable this
  3. Download uBlock Origin to restore ad blocking

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/37243#issuecomment-2033349720(Site changed by me to encompass most browsers.)

  • Disable (globally) sheilds via brave://settings/shields. “Ads & trackers”
  • Install uBlock Origin via https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock (Select respective browser extension store)
  • From uBlock Origin enable Fanboy Annoyances or Easylist Cookie lists, for feature parity with Brave.

If youtube/google (and other sites that implement something google uses that I’m currently not sure about) STILL doesn’t work with shields off, then continue reading.
Note that this still may not work and still cause it to crash. Even being offline and visiting the unloadable site may still crash. If you can manage it, try to install uBlock Origin then:

  1. Click uBlock icon
  2. Click the gears icon
  3. Click the My Filters tab
  4. Add the following two new lines in the large text box:

youtube.com
ytimg.com

  1. Click Apply Changes

This should prevent any and all youtube links from loading immediately, and can prevent the insta-crash. This isn’t fool-proof and anyone is welcome to suggest other lines to add to this to prevent crashing.
Taking yourself offline and attempting to visit the site to turn off the shields MIGHT work, if it doesn’t insta-crash. Then you can click proceed on the uBlock page and try loading the page. If it still crashes:

  1. Click uBlock icon
  2. Click the gears icon
  3. Click the Settings tab
  4. Click the Back up to file… button and save the file

From there, you can try renaming the following folder
C:\Users\(User)\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data
Rename it like _User Data, so you keep all your old data intact. Then try to open Brave again. You’ll need to reinstall uBlock Origin, then repeat the last set of instructions but on step 4 you’ll click Restore from file… this time. Once that’s done, disable shields like earlier. Then you can try again to visit youtube OFFLINE to see if the shields cause it to insta-crash. If it doesn’t, disable the shields for the site. Then go online and try to load. If it crashes, you’ll need to use a different browser dedicated to using youtube/google for now. There’s alternate browsers available like Opera/OperaGX and Firefox (which I know are supported by uBlock Origin), and uBO’s page is here https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
If you’re much more privacy-oriented, I’ll quote my friend:

-Supermium (https://github.com/win32ss/supermium/releases/tag/v122-hf) since it’s chromium based, but you need to set a flag to get more privacy oriented browsing since the guy hasn’t put all the patches in by default yet.
-Librewolf (https://librewolf.net/installation/) but that’s Firefox based. Librewolf is also more privacy oriented. But it also disables a lot of features by default to enforce that privacy.
Honestly I can’t recommend either over the other. They both have their pros and cons. Supermium works, but it’s also just Chrome made for older Windows versions with extra flags for more privacy.

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I didn’t verify, but I believe those two are still supported by uBO since they’re forks of Chromium and Firefox (respectively).
To restore your old Brave profile with everything intact, just delete User Data and rename the _User Data folder back to the old name. You’ll need to avoid youtube and google entirely, just in case. But other sites should still work as long as you leave those lines in uBlock Origin you added earlier.

For MOBILE USERS: I haven’t seen any solution other then updating if you can. I apologize for not having an answer available.
From a new post below, you can TEST if this works (remember to leave a heart for 'em if it helps!): Aggregate Topic: Outdated Brave crashing on YouTube - #194 by fanboynz (Click to jump to the post, too much text to quote)

A POSSIBLE band-aid fix you may be able to implement is at the top of this post under the webinstaller to prevent crashing, but Brave can’t adblock on youtube anymore if you do this.

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