“they actually appear to be almost the same” - how old are you @Matches ? Please be considerate of those more senior with worse eyesight. Why must they be smaller at all?
@feart,
It “has” to be smaller to fit the icon on the screen. However its worth noting that this is not a Brave feature but rather something that was inherited from the Chromium engine (including the “fixed”/“bigger” icons). I will suggest that we change this size to the team but I cannot guarantee it will be given any sort of real priority or even implemented at all.
Making UI changes (especially changes for something like favicons that change dimensions and appearance depending on the site you’re visiting) requires a lot more work than one would think — particularly when the change itself originates upstream (in the Chromium engine) as it requires us to constantly monitor and adjust/account for those changes in our code with every single Chromium update.
Lastly, it appears to be the difference of a couple of pixels:
And yes, I know that a couple pixels is more noticeable to some than others but it’s a big step up from the way the icons looked without the discard-ring-improvements flag implemented.
It’s not so much the few pixels smaller size @Mattches, it’s the circles. Humans identify an object in a group by observing what distinguishes it. With circles around favicons, there’s now less to distinguish tabs. More similarity. Identifying tabs will now take longer. The circles are useless UI clutter.
I appreciate you’re beholden to what the Chromium devs decide to an extent, but they’ve errored here. If you undo this damage to the browsing experience, you’ll deliver a competitive advantage for Brave over your Chromium rivals.
My other computer just got updated to Chrome 127, and it has the option we’re looking for. It’s just directly in the settings, right below the memory saver options.
It does not make the icons any smaller. It just stops changing the icon at all if the tab is unloaded.
All I ask is that you implement this in Brave as well. It should be easy since it’s already in Chromium. I expected it to be there since Brave also updated to Chromium 127.
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Thanks @pedalburg. This option exists in my Brave Version 1.68.131, Chromium: 127.0.6533.73. Solved 
Can you tell me where? I’m not finding it. Though I note my Brave is slightly newer: version 1.68.134 Chromium: 127.0.6533.88
Weird. I literally just updated, to be sure. And that option is still not there for me. I even turned Memory Saver back on and restarted, and I still don’t have that option.
And I’m on Brave v1.68.137, a later version than yours.
Are there maybe any relevant flags you have turned on (in brave://flags)?
also, @Mattches: any clue what’s going on, while one of us would have a setting the other doesn’t?
@pedalburg,
It looks like you’re using the current stable build of the browser while the feature at this time is only available in Nightly builds. It will make it’s way down the pipeline into stable.
Huh. The version numbering for nightlies is different than I’ve usually seen. Usually they would have a higher second number than the release version. But at least it makes sense.
I already have a workaround: I turn off memory saver and use an extension that discards tabs, albeit in a more crude way based on a timer. So I’ll just wait. Which release version would it be expected to show up in if it makes it through?
Current Release build: v1.68.137
Current Nightly build: v1.70.58
70 > 68 
I suspect this change will make it into v1.70x of release.
Okay, but the screenshots linked above all say 1.68.134, while I’m on 1.68.137. My version number has always been higher than theirs.
I believe that these users have a flag enabled — can you try enabling this flag in brave://flags and see if the option appears for you?
Aha! That works! I didn’t find that option when I was looking in brave://flags before.
Enabling that option gave me the option shown in the screenshot.
Thanks, @Mattches.
Am wanting to keep this thread alive. I’ve been really bothered by these ‘circled tabs’ ever since they appeared, but am trying to keep with Brave because I like it so much otherwise; but this feature is almost a dealbreaker for me.
I think that something that seems somewhat missing from this thread is that it’s not just that it makes favicons smaller–and even if it doesn’t–the thing is it makes the tabs fugly and affects the whole aesthetic of it. It is just very visually unattractive–people want to just see nice colorful icons and generally don’t care that the tab has memory-save enabled. Let that be a behind-the-scenes thing Brave is doing, and that’s all (please!).
I am on version 1.70.119 and there are absolutely no settings in brave://flags for this anymore.
Thanks for listening–I hope you can offer the option to disable this soon.
I’ve only just got this. It’s just another small thing that’s annoying and not needed for me.
Reading the thread i can see there’s a setting to turn it off, but i don’t have that. Restarting the browser doesn’t help. Yet as the circles appeared i got the pop up info thing saying it can be turned off in settings, but it can’t.
I only got this tonight. It says it can be turned off in settings, yet there’s no setting. I feel i’m being lied to by Brave.
As others have shown on this thread, there is a setting, at least for some. Was this temporary? Why don’t we have it? Why was i directed by Brave to settings when i don’t have this setting?
If it were more subtle i’d probably ignore it. As it is, it just looks tacky and annoying.
Is it really so hard to offer a setting that apparently already exists?
@PurpT64,
This setting is where you would expect it to be:
Settings --> Appearance --> Tabs --> Inactive tabs appearance
It will also show up by simply typing in Tabs in the Settings search bar:
Thanks. This setting wasn’t there when i posted on here. I restarted the browser a couple of times, and also looked after restarting the laptop.
It’s now in the settings.
I guess there must have been a glitch.
As an associated side issue. Many of us really don’t understand how the design works. We see comments about it being based on Chromium, so obviously Brave, and other browsers are reliant on that, so don’t have real freedom in design, more like how it’s implemented?
It’d be quite good if there were an article we can easily find that explains how it works. We gat angry about some of the dreadful designs, tabs being one of my personal hates, but we’d perhaps be more understanding if we knew where it comes from, and where we can go to give feedback to those who push it on you.
Does that make sense?
Like this one?