Description of the issue:
MacOS on my 2019 MacBookPro (running Sequoia 15.3.2) keeps shutting down/crashing as it attempts to open Brave, which it’s unfortunately doing automatically on startup in my main Mac account. I see a Brave Browser window open along with the dialogue box asking if I want to recover tabs from the last session, and before I can do anything, my mouse freezes and the computer crashes.
I’ve tried a number of things to troubleshoot:
Restart MacOS in safe mode - which doesn’t auto-load apps that were previously open, but launching Brave manually still crashes the OS.
Checking other browsers/apps - no problem.
Re-installing Brave, both by installing over the existing version and deleting the app and installing “fresh” - didn’t help.
Renaming the BraveSoftware folder in the Library directory and then deleting/re-installing the app. This DID seem to prevent the crash in both safe mode and my normal profile! But now I don’t have any of my user data or old tabs available.
So it appears to be related to my main Brave profile (and I’m guessing too many windows+tabs) because when using a fresh ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware folder, it doesn’t crash. When I swap the old folder back, it crashes again.
Unfortunately, I don’t have crash data collection/sending set up on the Brave profile that’s crashing.
How can this issue be reproduced?
Start the Brave browser with the corrupted BraveSoftware folder.
Watch it crash
Expected result:
Ideally, help me fix Brave so it doesn’t crash AND I still retain all of my user profile (tabs, bookmarks, settings, history, etc.)
Alternatively, tell me how I can extract/find a list of at least my open tabs and bookmarks, and I can set up the browser from scratch on my own.
@ultraB thanks for reporting. Does it crash in a private window or in a different profile?
If you have disabled the Automatically send diagnostic reports in Brave and experience a browser crash, you can still manually submit individual crash reports to us for our developers to review. To do this, please enter brave://crashes into the address bar to view the Crashes page:
Click the Send now button to send the crash report to us for review. Note that once the crash report is sent, a Uploaded crash report ID will be displayed. Submitted crash reports will end in 0’s.
Unfortunately, I cannot start the browser up without it crashing, so I cannot get to brave://crashes, nor can I open a private window, and I don’t have any other profiles set up (but couldn’t get to them even if I did because the browser crashes the computer as it opens).
Regardless, when I switch to the other, fresh Library folder, it doesn’t crash, so looking at brave://crashes there shows zero crashes - I assume that’s also stored in the Library folder, yes? I also believe crash reporting is turned off, not merely not automatically sent? If the crash data is still saved, is there a way to get to that data through the filesystem, and not through the browser itself?
Here’s what I see in crashes when using the clean library:
Yes, likely a few extensions, but it’s hard to know what. But looking in:
/Users/XXXXXXX/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Extensions/
I can see 4 subfolders. 1 appears to be 1-Password, which I know was installed. Not finding easy hints for the other 3.
Can you try starting your macOS in Safe mode again, then launching Brave using the macOS terminal with your extensions disabled to test and see if one of them is causing the crash? You can do this from the terminal by using the following command:
open -a "Brave Browser" --args --disable-extensions
I swapped the “misbehaving” library back in and opened Brave from the terminal, using the command you shared. It crashed the computer again, just as before.
So it seems like something in your original browser profile is causing the crash, given that you’re able to launch the browser successfully with a blank/fresh profile. I would ask you to try downloading the Beta version of the browser to test and see is this causes the crash to, but I feel confident that it will not.
Let me ask some the macOS team and see if they have any further suggestions on how to proceed. In the meantime, can you launch in safe mode again and disable Brave from autolaunching on system startup so we can work outside of safemode?
Yeah, I can. How do I disable Brave from autolaunching on system startup?
Happy to experiment more but if we run into dead ends, I’d appreciate if there’s a way to at least recover my open tabs (or list of URLs) and bookmarks.
I believe you can do this by going to (on macOS) System preferences --> General --> Login Items and extensions and remove Brave from the list at the top.
Ah, no, it’s not set to open on startup automatically. It’s that my Mac profile is set to re-open windows/apps that were last opened (just as the browser is).
I see. When you go to restart your mac, you should see a little prompt appear with a timer before it restarts. In that prompt, there should be a checkbox asking if you want to relaunch apps after restart – uncheck it.
Aha! I didn’t think that would work since I was switching from Safe Mode to my main user profile. (also, I had been restarting my computer a lot, but mostly from crashing it )
Okay, opening the Beta version, fresh install works find in my regular (not safe mode) MacOS profile.
)