Description of the issue:
A couple of days ago the profile switcher appeared in my extension bar. A second profile had been created which was empty.
After deleting the second profile, on starting Brave the next day it was created again. This keeps repeating like that. If I reopen Brave on the same day after deleting the profile, it’s not recreated.
How can this issue be reproduced?
I cannot give steps how to reproduce it.
Expected result:
The second profile is not (automatically) created.
Brave Version( check About Brave):
Version 1.20.103 Chromium: 88.0.4324.152 (Official Build) (x86_64)
Do you start Brave from a shortcut? If that shortcut includes a profile that doesn’t exist (yet) Brave will create it. If your shortcut looks like this it will only ever start the default profile:
If you start Brave without specifying a profile it will start in the same configuration it was last closed down in. I haven’t tried this, but it could be possible that if you shut down with two profiles running, delete the second profile and start up again Brave automatically recreates the second profile.
The same day/next day difference is probably because when you shut down Brave it keeps running in the background. You effectively only shut down the GUI, unless you de-select that option in settings (it is on by default).
The behaviour you’re seeing is somehow related to one or more of these three things. I hope I have given you enough leads to work out what is causing it in your case
It looks like you’re running on Windows and things seem to be different here. On macOS (or on my machine anyway) there’s no option “Continue running background apps when Brave is closed”.
My shortcut is only the Brave icon in the dock, which runs the application without any extra parameters.
Also note that this is a recent thing (since the app icon was changed to the logo on a white background I believe). I’ve been running Brave for more than a year and didn’t experience this before.
@jost-s,
If you delete the profile, then go, on your OS, to ~Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-browser, you should still see a Default folder here, but do you see a folder here labeled “Profile” or “Profile 1” or “Profile 2” etc?
@jost-s,
Whichever one of those is the one you use regularly, can you go back to ~Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-browser, find the folder that is not the one you have been using, trash the folder. Then go back to the profile manager and remove the profile that way as well. Now test and see if the issue persists.
@Mattches Thanks for your advice, however there’s no folder “Person 1” which is the profile name that I’m not using. There’s only “Profile 1” and “Guest Profile”.
Can I back up the data in “Profile 1” and then delete that profile too, create a new one and then copy the back up into that new profile’s folder?
Yes you can. I’m just not sure what is causing the extra profile to be created when you boot your PC, so if the issue lies within the profile itself (for some reason) your solution would still yield a new profile created on boot. You should still try though. Or try backing up your profile somewhere safe then doing a complete un/reinstall.
@Mattches Great, I’m trying the copying first. In fact there was a Default folder which I must have overlooked. I’ve moved all profile folders out of Brave-browser, then deleted all profiles, shut down Brave, opened it again, made sure there’s a new Default folder, quit Brave, copied contents from my back up to Default and launched Brave again.
So far so good. I’ll let you know how I get on. Perhaps we can still solve this riddle
