Brave doesn’t quit properly/ghost tabs

Version 1.64.116 Chromium: 123.0.6312.105
Windows 10

This is a repost from 6 months ago but the problem persists.
Since then I have a new PC and a new install of Windows.
I have tried disabling every extension and disabling them one by one. Brave does this even with no extensions installed.

Brave refuses to quit properly. This is what my Task Manager looks like when Brave should be completely closed. Not a single window open. I have the “run in the background” setting disabled.

I also have the setting enabled to clear cookies and site history on exit, and noticed those don’t get cleared either. The only way to get this setting to do what it’s supposed to is to open the Task Manager and shut down each process individually.

Using a 3rd party extension I was able to determine that when this happens, there are supposedly several open windows with just an empty tab. These Windows don’t show up by any regular means. Closing them from this 3rd party extension allows the browser to shut down properly.

2023-10-29 11_03_03-Current Session - Session Buddy - Brave

The only way I’ve been able to get these “ghost tabs” to show up was once after Brave crashed, and the “restore” function returned not only the one active window I had been using, but 20 (yes, twenty!) windows with nothing but one empty tab on them.

To replicate this bug the browser needs to have been running for a while, but it doesn’t require anything special.

@kotitonttu,
Thank you for reaching out.
Going to be honest I’ve not seen this before that I can recall and am not sure what would be causing it. Let me reach out to a couple engineers to see what they think might be the cause.

Out of curiosity, can you try downloading and launching the Beta build of the browser and tell me if you get the same results?

Hi @kotitonttu

Maybe we can narrow down what those open processes are. If you open Brave and then open the Brave Task Manager (hamburger menu > More tools... > Task manager (or keyboard shortcut), I’m curious what shows up there.

As you shared, you did a restore and that showed 20 empty tabs. Maybe the task manager in Brave will have more info - are they belonging to an extension? etc.

I would definitely recommend to disable all extensions via brave://extensions. Close Brave and either kill all the open Brave processes or restart. Then check and see if the problem reproduces. If not, you can try enabling the extensions one by one (turn on, exit/relaunch, browse a bit, close browser, is there extra process?).

This isn’t regular behavior and a completely clean install shouldn’t be doing it. Please let us know

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There’s nothing here that looks out of place.

I just had this happen again (Brave refusing to quit), and closed the processes (from the Brave task manager) one at a time. Each time closing the last window, reopening it and seeing if the history is cleared. That’s how I know Brave isn’t closing properly, since I have the “clear history on exit” enabled. The browser also launches immediately as opposed to a ~1 second delay when it has fully shut down.

So, I first killed each extension from here. Then I disabled the remaining few from the Extensions window. Then I killed what looked like internal processes from the Brave Task Manager until I was down to just one, the “Browser”. Some of those did relaunch right away though.

At this point Windows Task Manager showed only 4 Brave processes. Three with about 10-30MB and one with 220MB RAM usage. I killed the 220 one and that allowed the browser to shut down fully. They were all simply titled “Brave Browser”.

I believe that this isn’t regular behavior, but I’d hate to keep using a clean install with no extensions for a prolonged amount of time as it can take a few days of use for the browser to go into this “no-shutdown state”. At least once this “state” has been triggered, it doesn’t seem disabling or quitting extensions does anything.

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