I have been very frustrated with Brave recently. It has been very slow and definitely unsatisfactory. I believe I have saved ~10 hours with Brave, used it for slightly more than a year, so throughout the last 2 weeks I have been on the fence about leaving. I love(d) Brave, its speediness, and the amazing adblocking that it provided. However I cannot deal with the instability that Brave is having right now.
Description of the issue:
The main problem is this: I tried to switch to Edge, so I was ready to try to export my bookmarks, passwords, and history, There seems to be no such feature, which is rather annoying, but I can deal with it. The big problem now is Brave will not open, neither from my taskbar nor my search bar. It crashed after I tried to open settings.
This is one of the many problems that Brave has that is causing me to switch. Crashes, screen turning black randomly, and most recently performance is really bad for some reason. I want to love Brave because of how much time I’ve spent with it, and how happy I was when I discovered it, but it is so difficult to use right now. For now Edge Beta + uBlock Origin will be my choice, but I do hope to eventually come back to Brave. In fact when I discovered it I actually showed all my colleagues, who were very happy with it as well. I am sure that my situation is not a one time thing, as they have been experiencing slowdowns as well. I also used it for mobile but the lack of proper sync is somewhat frustrating as well… but at least it is not incredibly slow.
How can this issue be reproduced?
Overload Brave with too many tabs/processes (?)
When unresponsive attempt to wait
When waiting fails, exit.
Brave does not open
Expected result:
Brave should open but does not.
Brave Version( check About Brave):
Not possible, I cannot open Brave. But it is most recent as I did not see the little “update” arrow.
Additional Information:
I really really like Brave, but I also cannot have this happening…
I have been searching around and some other people suggest deleting and reinstalling. Is there any alternatives? I do not wish to lose all my info, nor to waste much space as my SSD is quite limited, at only 128GB.
Also, in Brave password manager can I see each password? Is there a show password function? This will make it easier to export to Edge, albeit manually.
@Juicysnail,
I believe the issue you’re encountering is a known one, wherein the browser will crash if it’s part of a Sync chain. If you remove the device from the Sync chain, the crashes should stop.
Can you try the following method to disable Sync on launch?
Right-click the desktop shortcut you use to launch the browser, then click Properties
In the Target field, append the string with --disable-brave-sync (outside the quotes). The full path should now look something like "C:\Program Files (x86)\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\brave.exe" --disable-brave-sync
Press Apply then OK and double click the now edited icon to launch Brave.
Let me know if you continue to experience crashes after launching in this way.
Thanks for trying to help, but the problem is that Brave does not open at all. I still cannot open Brave from any source after trying this. You may be correct about the sync chain thing though, I am synced with my iPhone.
@Juicysnail,
To confirm, after making the changes to the shortcut’s Target path as instructed above, double-clicking the icon does not launch the browser at all? A couple things to try:
If the above is correct and you can’t launch Brave via the shortcut icon, can you try launching from the command line? You can do so by entering the same path as above (verbatim) in the Windows Command prompt (or Powershell) and hitting “enter”.
Can you launch a private window by right-clicking on [any] Brave icon/shortcut and selecting New Private window?
You are correct. However I cannot launch Brave from Windows Command Prompt, nor can I open a private window. What happens is I get the “loading” blue circle thing for half a second, then nothing happens.
At this point I’ve uninstalled Brave, and I can’t reinstall it at all. When reinstalling it just gives me an error, saying an error occurred and that Brave might be open. It’s not…
I’ve re downloaded the installer from the website multiple times, but it has not worked.
When you go to un/reinstall, make sure that in addition to uninstalling the program via Add/Remove programs, you navigate to ~/AppData/Local/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser and delete this folder/data as well.
Note that this will also delete any Brave browsing data you had on this install.
I don’t want to delete my browsing history! Can I reinstall it without it deleting it? I still need to go back to the password manager to dig out my old passwords, as well as bookmarks I still don’t have.