Description of the issue:
While watching YouTube, at any random moment if at least it seems two windows are open, Brave’s UI will lock up, and the video will be frozen, but the audio continues to play for around 5 seconds, before that too locks up.
It seems to be specific to YouTube only (and it’s hard to tell if it’s YouTube’s anti-adblock war causing this, or not. Being with how random it is, I haven’t found any known ways to intentionally cause it to occur).
Steps to Reproduce (add as many as necessary): 1. 2. 3.
Have YouTube playing throughout the day on one window, and work in another window (it can be any website it seems, though ChatGPT and YouTube appear to be a combo that causes it to happen a bit more often). Eventually at some point (it may happen, it may not, sometimes it happens in a few hours, sometimes shorter), the UI freezes, but not the title bar (this is important for the workaround).
Actual Result (gifs and screenshots are welcome!):
UI freezes, you can’t interact with the bookmark bar, you can’t click the hamburger menu, you can’t scroll on websites.
Expected result:
To continue playing video, not get stuck with a frozen UI.
Reproduces how often:
At least twice in a day for me, this varies it seems for other people (more will be put under Additional Information as a Redditor has the perfect video screencap of the issue that I hadn’t been able to catch, as their workaround worked, therefore it’s an identical issue to me).
Operating System and Brave Version(See the About Brave page in the main menu):
Windows 11 build 26100.4351, Brave Version 1.79.123 (Chromium: 137.0.7151.104, but I assume you knew that, but included it anyway just in case).
Additional Information:
Ok so here’s where Reddit came to the rescue. My workaround was to simply close the windows or end task. I thought Brave crashed, but apparently it’s not actually frozen. If I minimize the window with YouTube, all of a sudden everything “unfreezes” and comes back, no data lost, and YouTube picks up exactly where it left off. In fact, since the freeze affects all open Brave windows, I noticed that simply minimizing YouTube all of a sudden unfreezes other windows without needing to minimize them as well. So I’m almost tempted to say YouTube is causing this but don’t have proof. No logs are generated in Event Viewer by Brave either to give me a clue.
However, and hopefully I’m allowed to link to Reddit, but this user posted about this issue 3 months ago and it’s identical to there’s, and there “fix” happens to fix it for me as well.
I did notice something I wish to share as it might help. This freeze started happening when I upgraded from a GTX 1080 Ti to a Radeon RX 7900 XT 2 weeks ago. When I had the 1080 Ti, this freezing issue never happened for me whatsoever, however the Redditor with the same issue appears to be using an RTX 2080 Ti (however they were on the latest drivers as of 3 months ago, I however was on the December drivers as I heard nothing but bad things about the 57x.xx branch of drivers and avoided it since I was upgrading GPU’s anyway.) I did DDU the Nvidia drivers before upgrading GPU’s, and currently my AMD Adrenaline driver is 25.6.1 (the issue happened as well on 25.5.1).
I also have an iGPU in my Ryzen 5 8600G which is active as well as the 7900 XT. If required for testing, I am more than happy to tell Windows to have Brave run on the iGPU instead and see if the issue persists, in case it helps.
I would upload the brave://gpu report, but I cannot since I am a new user. But if there’s something I can look for in there, I am happy to assist in any way I can.