Brave with hardware acceleration enabled causing MacBook Pro to crash and restart

Browser Support
1

Description of the issue:
Hello

For the last month, I have had constant crashing when using my MacBook Pro. I have spent this time trying to troubleshoot the issue, but it appears to be Brave being the one causing these crashes.

I have used Firefox and Safari, and I do not have the same issues, but it appears to be only Brave that appears to do it.

The issue happens on a number of sites, so there is no specific site causing this. The crash reports also don’t point to Brave, but more of a part of macOS, but brave is the only app causing this.

Here are some of the things I have tried:

  • Reinstall Brave
  • Disabled all extensions
  • Disabled hardware acceleration

Disabling hardware acceleration has stopped these crashes, but I have noticed a decrease in animation performance and other animations on websites.

I do suspect that it has something to do with my GPU of the MacBook Pro (crash reports don’t point to Brave), but since this is only happening on Brave, I thought it would be good to raise this first, before contacting Apple Support.

Steps to Reproduce
1 ) Open Brave
2) If not already enabled, turn on the hardware acceleration option.
3) After some time (1 hour, to a couple of hours), clicking a tab will freeze macOS
4) After 25 - 30 seconds, macOS will restart and boot up again.

Actual Result (gifs and screenshots are welcome!):
No screenshots or video available due to the random nature of it.

Expected result:
Not to crash

Reproduces how often:
Every couple of hours, sometimes when waking up from sleep, sometimes days.

Operating System and Brave Version
Device
MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2019
macOS Bug Sur 11.2

Brave
Version 1.20.108 Chromium: 88.0.4324.182 (Official Build) (x86_64)

Additional Information:
I have attached an image of a crash report (I have three in total available). I would attach txt files, but not allowed due to being a new user.

Screenshot 2021-02-22 at 11.41.52
Screenshot 2021-02-22 at 11.41.524888×3186 1.58 MB

1 Like
2

Would be good to get some help with this.

3

@BenBrehaut,
There are some known issues regarding Hardware Acceleration that the team is working on presently. Typically, even with HWA disabled, users still shouldn’t have issues with animation/video content while browsing. Can you confirm for me what type of animation/video and/or what specific sites/content you’re seeing the issues on?

4

@Mattches the examples range from normal CSS animations to HTML <canvas> examples.

The first one I can think of is Github.

The globe at the top of the page is an example with <canvas> (extreme example) but there are examples throughout that page using just CSS Animations.

Video content I haven’t noticed anything different.

Will reply with some more examples when I come across them.

5

@BenBrehaut,
Thank you for the examples. However, I’m still unclear about where the issue is – on my end, the globe seems to load and animate without any issues. I also checked vs Chrome and Firefox just to make sure they didn’t look or move differently (they didn’t). Is there a specific graphical anomaly I should be looking for?

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