Hey there, yesterday I setup the Brave News feed in my Brave browser and I added around 10 or so RSS feeds. Today, my browser now crashes within 10-20 seconds after I open it, every time. If I go directly to Customize → Brave News to attempt to disabled it, my browser crashes immediately. So I’m pretty confident this news feed is the source of my inability to use Brave any longer.
I’ve tried downloading and running the installer, disabling hardware acceleration and a number of other suggestions from this forum for folks who have crash issues, but haven’t had any luck.
My question, is there a way to disable the news feed in some way other than going through Customize → Brave News? Is there any way to reset that specific feature? Appreciate any thoughts.
@matowens,
Thanks for reaching out. I cannot reproduce this myself but I’ve asked the team to take a look at this. Additionally, I see that we have an open issue on our Github that sounds similar to what you’re describing, although not exact. Can you take a look and see how close the issue below is to the issue you’re encountering?
Either way I do hope to have more information for you soon, thank you.
Hey @Mattches, this sounds very similar to the issue I’m experiencing. It could very well be a large RSS feed that’s causing my browser to hang and crash, too. I’ll watch this Github issue and see if the fix there also addresses mine.
In the mean time, I was able to disable the Brave News feature with @CerealLover’s help. I did try reenabling Brave News in hopes that disabling could have cleared out something related to the bug, but the browser crashed immediately again. Will keep it disabled for now. Fingers crossed that the issue will get resolved when this patch comes out.
I have seen this in Android. Brave Nightly. But it was when the news feed was introduced. I tried adding my own feed. It just crashed. I couldn’t get it back to work. I had to uninstall and reinstall. But I had all 3 channels. Release, Beta, Nightly. I have news feed enabled only in nightly. I am not sure if it crashes too soon there is a way to disable without opening the browser. I am sorry, what I said was not useful. But used this opportunity to share my experience.
@matowens,
If you’d like, you can try digging into your preferences files and removing RSS feeds this way, then re-enabling News to see if you still get the crashes. If you’d like to try, ensure that your browser is closed, then use the following steps:
On the Windows search bar, type %AppData% and hit enter. Navigate up one level in the directory (as you should have landed in AppData --> Roaming from the search) to Appdata --> Local
From this folder, navigate to BraveSoftware --> Brave Browser --> User Data --> Default. Find the Preferences file here. Make a backup of this file (copy it and paste it somewhere else like your desktop — just in case we need to revert to what it was originally).
Open this file — note that it is a JSON file so if opened in a regular text editor, it may appear as one giant block of text which may make this next part trickier (but not impossible). You may also use online JSON viewers or a more advanced editor such as Notepad++, Brackets, VSCode, etc which can all format JSON files to be more readable.
Once you’ve opened the file, search this file for the string "userfeeds" — for example, here is the search in my own preferences file (formatted JSON):
From here, you can remove individual RSS feeds you’ve added to Brave news by simply deleting these entries.
Save the file.
Now when you launch the browser, any RSS feeds you’ve added should be removed from the browser. Let me know what you find out or if you have any questions about the process.
