I was not having any issues with Brave in the past. Bought my Macbook Pro M1 13" when it was released and CPU usage has been a steady 35-40C under any load except AAA games and Stable Diffusion A1111 renders. When the last update came through, I noticed that CPU temps were crazy high for no reason.
How can this issue be reproduced?
To eliminate all other causes, I shut down the system and only loaded Brave Browser along with Youtube, ChatGPT and Confluence. CPU temps immediately skyrocketted from 35C to 80C. I uninstalled Brave Browser and did a fresh install. Loaded my standard 3 tabs and again temps when to 80C. This was never an issue before.
I went in to Brave settings and for the first time in my life, turned OFF hardware acceleration and temps came down to 39C. Not perfect but close to normal.
I am 100% certain there is a bug in the latest release that is causing Mac OS Brave Browser to push Apple Silicon to its limits. Temps this high are extremely uncommon and I would only expect to see this in browser when viewing a very detailed gaussian splatting model.
Expected result:
CPU temps should be 35-40C under any load in Brave Browser. Only exception is when running gaussian splatting model in browser and then temps went to 70-80C.
Version 1.60.125 Chromium: 119.0.6045.199 (Official Build) (arm64)
Same thing. No problems with this until the most recent update/upgrade of Brave (near end of November 2023, early December 2023 - I usually don’t click the Update option immediately in the upper right).
Computer is Macbook Air 13" with M1 (Apple Silicon). Not seeing a lot of reports of this CPU issue so may be isolated to ARM/Apple Silicon chips.
I saw someone recommend getting rid of extensions. I’ve disabled all extensions but eventually the Browser starts to overuse CPU. Its noticeable because the laptop gets warm.
Same version as original poster Version 1.60.125 Chromium: 119.0.6045.199 (Official Build) (arm64)
Mac m1 and I also noticed this today. My battery is draining so fast and running very hot after latest update. I really hope they implement a fix soon.
I was able to isolate this issue to Youtube. Brave Browser works fine as long as I don’t have a Youtube tab open. Opened Youtube on Safari and temps were fine (under 40C). Open the same link on Brave Browser and it immediately goes from 40C to 80C (and higher, because I need to manually turn the fans on to stabilise temps). If I close Youtube, temps immediately come back down.
My guess is that Youtube developers are trying to force ads and this is conflicting with whatever code Brave has to block said ads. Either way, Brave is basically unusable for me right now and I’m going to use Safari until this issue is resolved.
Apple Silicon is more than capable to run whatever you throw at it without overheating, so this is a pretty massive issue. For anyone reading this on PC, this would be the equivalent of Youtube pushing your CPU to the same level Red Dead Redemption 2, with the fans turned off as Apple does not engage fans until temps get to 105C.
I can’t say it is Youtube in my case as I haven’t been there much. Another factor is I pay for Google’s music service and part of that package is youtube doesn’t show me advertisements.
With all that said, I guess I’ll try to make a connection to some site that may be the culprit here. I’ll be looking forward to the next update as I don’t think rollback is an easy option here but maybe something I need to consider backing up app directories in addition to my data directories.
I’d recommend exporting your history and saving the passwords out in case you need to start a new sync chain. I personally had to start a new sync chain because I was running off v1 and apparently v2 is incompatible. My wallet doesn’t seem to have been effected as I think that’s just connected through the Gemini account.
For the time being, I’m running Youtube off Safari and using Brave Browser for everything else. That seems to be working for me.
Interesting it’s not Youtube that is effecting you. I wonder if it has something to do with transform: translate3d() in the CSS, as I know from being a web dev that this forces the GPU to render the page instead of the CPU. Since Apple Silicon has its own GPU cores, perhaps this is where the issue is coming from?
Thanks for suggestions on exporting before restoring. I haven’t had any issues with the browser today and no reboot or anything special either. Surfing habits pretty much the same.
As far as youtube my guess is youtube just doesn’t try to inject ads into my video feed so if it related to ads or css/javascript around ads I wouldn’t be impacted on the site versus someone who wasn’t paying for the google music service that also has the benefit of not having to deal with ads on youtube.
@stonejames when you mention that turning off hardware acceleration has an impact, that tells us that the issue is with the GPU. I’d make sure that you have all drivers updated and that you revisit your graphics settings.
For example, there was someone with a similar issue and they resolved it by resetting their graphics and doing a clean install of the driver. High GPU load on YT and Twitch
Better way might be to create a new browser profile and make sure not to add any extensions to it. This won’t get rid of your existing profile, but just will create a secondary one to use for troubleshooting.
Other thing to do as well is check everything at brave://flags and putting back to default if you changed anything before.
Other thing you and others may want to check is your settings under brave://settings/system. For example:
** NOTE **
Do keep in mind that any changes made to brave://flags or any custom content filters you add to Shields will persist across profiles on the same device. So if you create new profiles for testing, those are things you also have to consider and change.
