Description of the issue:
Brave launches automatically at startup.
How can this issue be reproduced?
- Check your “Login Items” list on your Mac. Settings > General > Login Items. See if Brave is present in the login items list. (It should not be present normally)
- Install “SessionBox” extension from Chrome Web Store
- As soon as the extension is finished installing, “Brave Browser” will get added to the Login Items of the Mac. On macOS Ventura 13.1, I was even shown a system notification saying that a new item has been added to Login Items.
Expected result:
An extension should NOT be able to add Brave Browser or anything to the “Login Items” list of the operating system without any check/consent/warning.
Brave Version( check About Brave):
Version 1.46.144 Chromium: 108.0.5359.128 (Official Build) (arm64)
Additional Information:
I was able to replicate the same issue on Chrome - Version 108.0.5359.124 (Official Build) (arm64).
What is going on!
Isn’t this a serious issue? How can an extension have the privilege to add itself to the Login Items list on macOS? What privilege or permission is this? How is Brave and Chrome letting this happen?
Link to another thread (now closed) mentioning similar issue (it also links to 3 other links mentioning similar issues): Brave Keeps Adding Itself To Login Items [Mac]
Update
Discovered a Chromium Bug report back from 2012 - 10 years back - where something similar was reported: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=140017 (read the post made in November 2022 at the end of the long thread) or directly read the commit message: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/fee70e5f023da215c410ff7c0cfdada633896134
Apparently, this is due to the “background mode” feature of Chromium which apparently works correctly on Windows but is improperly implmented on macOS.
As per the link above, it says the issue is “Fixed” by Avi Drissman [email protected]. Maybe this issue will get resolved when Brave and Chrome gets updated to Chromium 109.x.x.x builds.