Hello, I need help to make windows work in the background when another application is running. previously you went to brave://flags and it was enough to turn off one flag (calculate window occlusion) then you had to turn off the m130 flag, reset it so that the previously mentioned one appeared and then turn it off, now there is some change again and this window occlusion flag is not there , disabling the m130 flag does not restore it either, does anyone know how to solve this or any other way to make the browser run in the background?
@walechuij can you confirm that you have the Continue running background apps when Brave is closed option enabled in Settings --> System?
Additionally, what exactly do you need the browser running in the background for? Just curious as to what task you’re trying to run to see if that is relevant to the issue.
Same problem here, I have continue running background apps when brave is closed enabled
This is not related to running processes while Brave is closed.
This is when, literally, you want a brave window to be in the background, and have another transparent fullscreen window on top of it.
For example, I use my code editor in the terminal, it is entirely transparent, and I either have my wallpaper or a youtube video or other running in the background. The flag m130 allowed an older flag (calculate window occlusion) to be modified and subsequently unset, which meant that when the brave window was occluded, it would still keep rendering stuff in the background (like said video).
Now, since chromium deprecated this flag entirely, it’s apparently impossible to turn off window occlusion, so it’s impossible to run a video in the background with another transparent window on top of it.
It would be really nice if brave itself would add a solution to this.
@Dekharen apologies for my misunderstanding.
However, I seem to be able to do what you’re describing on my Win10 system without any issue in Brave. Here’s what I did — please let me know if I got the steps/setup wrong so I can ensure I’m using the right steps to reproduce the issue here:
- Launched Brave and went to youtube.com
- Launched CMD/Terminal — edited appearance to be at 30% opacity so it is very close to transparent
- Started streaming content on YT
- Pulled up terminal on top of Brave window streaming YT content
Everything seems to work fine here. Works if the video in Brave is full screen or normal size and works at different terminal opacities as well. Here’s a recording as well (apologies for the horrible frame-rate — forgot to adjust before clicking “record”):
Yes, this works as intended; however, try maximizing the terminal window (with windows key + up key, or with the button on the top bar, or by dragging the window to the top part), and it will now appear as a blur in the background (because the entire brave window is now occluded by the terminal window, and it now auto-optimizes rendering). Audio will work properly, but not video. This was prevented before by the flag I mentioned, but now I don’t think there is any way to do so unless chromium added a separate flag.
I can provide a video if you’d like, but with your setup you should be able to test this very quickly. (reposted for @ notification)
Just tested and unfortunately (kind of) the video appears to run perfectly fine with respect to quality/blurriness. Tested again with the Brave window maximized and video standard and also with the video in full screen + Terminal window maximized.
I cannot directly post a video because my account is too new, but here is a link to a video of the behavior. Maybe cmd.exe itself has some weird interaction with the browser. It would be the same behavior with a fullscreen video.
Maybe there IS another flag that affects that behavior that you have enabled ? It used to be the occlusion flag that controlled this, but maybe it was moved over to some other option you already have enabled.
@Dekharen I don’t have any flags enabled so not sure what the difference is here. I even tried testing with PowerShell, which you appear to be using, but I’m still getting the same results.
Let me ask a couple colleagues that might be able to help to take a look and see if they have any other suggestions. In the meantime, can you confirm whether or not this only occurs in Brave? Can you test against another browser (Edge, Chrome, anything built on Chromium ideally) and see if you get the same results there?
I’m using wezterm linked to powershell, but this happens with any emulator or really any window I’ve used (Alacritty for example, but in general any window covering brave or other chromium browser just suspends all working pixels).
This is the same behavior on google chrome;
And this is the same behavior on Edge.
All chromium browser should share this behavior, although Vivaldi does not (It might use an older or heavily customized chromium, though.)
Although it’s a registry key description, this is the flag that was originally possible to enable or disable on previous versions of chromium ; it stops all moving pixels. (As the original post described, you had to enable the m130 flag first, which enables older, to-be-removed flags, to have access to this one. It makes sense that it was eventually removed, but now the question is how to have the same behavior…)
I’m pretty sure there’s a website that describes flags evolution, but I don’t remember the name of it, so this will have to do.
I’m actually really curious as to how it’s working on your machine.
@Dekharen are you on Win11 or Win10?
Sorry, I forgot to mention that. I’m on Win10 too. But this behavior “should” be platform agnostic.
Just as a check-in, have you got any news on this @Mattches ? 
I can always use Vivaldi as a backup for videos, but I usually prefer using Brave.
@Dekharen let me reach out to a couple colleagues and see if they have any suggestions. Hope to have more information for you soon. Appreciate your patience.
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@Dekharen Do you have energy/memory saver enabled by chance (brave://settings/system)? If so, can you try disabling them and test to see if this makes any difference?
I do use that option @Mattches ; sadly, I’ve :
- disabled the memory saver
- restarted brave entirely
- tried to occlude the window again
And the “problem” (well, intended behavior) still persists.
I’ll try messing around with the registry keys and brave://policy later to see if I can use that to disable the flag through that still, but I doubt it. I don’t even know if chromium has literally removed all code related to disabling window occlusion or has just removed the flag itself.
I have switched to vivaldi in the meantime ; if brave brings back the feature I will switch again
Well the feature never “left”. The flag was removed by Chromium upstream (not Brave) and further, for whatever reason, this does not appear to be an issue for everyone, as nobody on our team who tested was able to reproduce the issue.
I will reply here if we find out any more information about the issue.
Well, I mean that if brave decides to implement something similar to the behavior of the flag, then I’ll use it again for these endeavors. The feature definitely left, it just didn’t leave brave, it left the entirety of the chromium ecosystem. Which to begin with is a weird decision, I haven’t been able to find out why exactly users wanting this behavior was an issue to begin with.
It is weird that you can’t reproduce this, as it is the expected behavior of all chromium browsers. If you’re building from source, maybe there is a difference with the distributed versions. That is definitely not normal.
Standard Brave stable release downloaded from the official website – same as [most] our users have on a Win10 system.