Whereas the up- and down-arrow keys normally have the effect of scrolling the screen, mine now have the effect of moving the focus to the next or previous focusable element, which means that, on many web sites, they have no visible effect at all. But even if the effect was visible, it’s not the desired one; it’s very inconvenient not to be able to scroll the screen with these keys. (The scroll bar itself still works, though.)
To confirm that the problem must be with a Brave setting, I created a new profile and that one offers the expected functionality.
But I don’t see any pertinent setting.
Is there a way to dump all the settings into a plain-text file, so that I could compare the settings of these two profiles side-by-side?
BTW: The reason why I want to fix this rather than continue with the new profile is that, with the new profile, I can’t login to my bank’s portal (which I do every day) without it asking for 2FA verification. With my “old” profile, it only required 2FA verification if I had re-started the browser, which I rarely do.
@yellowfinch,
There are no settings that would change this functionality unless you somehow changed what the buttons do in Settings --> System --> Shortcuts but it seems like you’d remember doing that.
Is there a specific website in which you are testing the behavior? Does the behavior occur on all sites?
What else could explain such a difference in behavior between two profiles?
I had not accessed that page of the settings before the symptom started (I didn’t even know of it) but even after I discovered it and scrutinized it, I didn’t see a pertinent entry in the entire list.
The behavior occurs on all sites. For some, it doesn’t make much difference; for others (most, in fact) the result is that pressing the down key has no apparent effect, unless you press it a great many times and then the screen scrolls a little because the focus has finally reached an element that was below the previously visible content of the window. For yet others, the effect is visible simply because the focused element has some distinctive display feature. That’s how I learned, after a few days of wondering, that the arrow keys had not stopped working outright but rather changed their effect.
I have very few extensions: Switch to new tab and High Contrast, which are not plausible culprits, and Cookie AutoDelete, whose settings I exported from the old profile and imported into the new, to ensure they were identical, and which is thereby also eliminated from suspicion.
In fact, I don’t think cookies could explain the symptom because it affects all domains, including all the ones I’ve been accessing regularly for years. If the change had been induced by some flukey corruption of a cookie, only the domain in question would be affected.
Hence my wanting to dump all settings from both profiles, to compare them.
Keep in mind that sometimes extensions have impacts far from what you would think. Too many people associate extensions with certain functions and think it’s impossible that they’d have an impact on others, but not true. It can be very awkward.
Well, you checking private helps alleviate suspicion as long as you don’t have it authorized to run in private. Guessing also if you disable the extensions on the profile you’re having problems with the issue doesn’t go away. (Just trying to confirm)
Actually, I wonder…if you click on any text on the screen, do you see a cursor? I’m wondering if you might have activated caret browsing, which is F7 to enable/disable. I mean, you could try pressing F7 just to see if it goes away, but if it is active and contributing then you’d see a flashing area when you click by any text on the screen, similar as to what would appear when you’re typing.
I’m not sure if it would perform exactly as you’re describing but the behavior is very similar in how things work as you go to websites and try to navigate, especially if done without you specifically clicking on an area.
I would not eliminate any of those extensions from being possible causes. We can test this by creating a new profile (Menu --> More tools --> Add profile) or opening a Guest profile, closing your original profile window, then testing to see if the behavior persists.
Edit: Also great point @Saoiray — could be caret browsing.
It was indeed caret navigation. Thank you so much!
I didn’t know that Chromium and its derivatives offered this mode.
Testing it now, I see that pressing F7 triggers a popup question. So I would have had to accidentally press F7 and not see the popup and press Enter before anything else. That seems far-fetched, but that must be it because there is no other explanation.
up- and 
down-arrow keys normally have the effect of scrolling the screen, mine now have the effect of moving the focus to the next or previous focusable element, which means that, on many web sites, they have no visible effect at all. But even if the effect was visible, it’s not the desired one; it’s very inconvenient not to be able to scroll the screen with these keys. (The scroll bar itself still works, though.)
