Yesterday my Brave browser crashed all of a sudden while watching a YouTube video. After that, every time I tried to open it, it would open the start screen for a few second and close itself right away.
This seems to be a relatively frequent issue and I did find quite a few proposed solutions, none of which helped in my case, so I thought I’d share how I solved it, in case it helps anyone else.
I tried running it with the --disable-gpu flag, deleting all the extensions subfolders, opening a private window. None of these worked at all.
Trying a second profile briefly worked, I could get to brave://crashes, and send some logs, but after a while the second profile also started crashing.
So I thought of deleting and reinstalling Brave. Because I didn’t want to lose my data, I made a copy of the User Data folder. While copying it, i got a message saying that publisher_info_db couldn’t be read or copied.
Not sure if there’s some faulty sector in my HD, or if the file itself got corrupted, but I found that file and just deleted it and everything works now!
I have no idea what that file does. I do know that it gets automatically recreated when you open the browser again.
I don’t know if I am posting in the correct section. If I’m not, feel free to move it or tell me where I should post it.
Have a nice day!