@fairmarketvalue do us all a favor and create a new topic. Advise of:
Which OS you’re using (Such as Windows 11, Android 12, etc)
Which version of Brave (seems you listed 1.60.114, but just verify and have it listed on new topic)
What happens when/if you download a theme. (Themes should store in Brave as an extension, so it’s possible you may need to look in extensions as well).
Hello,
I use the Brave browser on 2 Windows machines. One is a desktop and the other is a laptop. This issue pertains to my laptop machine. Here are my answers to your three questions:
OS – Windows 11 Home (version 22H2)
Brave version – 1.60.114
When downloading a theme, the webstore first checks the selection and then says “Added to Brave”. The “Appearance” tab of Brave’s settings then shows the name of the theme that was downloaded, and the overall colors of the theme are applied in Brave, but none of the pictures associated with the theme are shown, even when a new tab page is clicked. For example, when the “Dogs HD” theme is downloaded, the theme is confirmed in “Appearance”, but no “dogs” photos are shown, even if multiple NTPs are invoked.
The theme that was downloaded does not appear in the “Extensions” tab. This is the case for any theme downloaded from the Chrome Webstore.
NOTE: On my desktop computer (Windows 11 Home – version 21H2) running Brave 1.60.114, I have previously downloaded a theme called “Labrador Retriever HD Dog & Puppy Wallpaper”. This theme does NOT show up on the settings “Appearance” tab but IS shown on the “On startup - Open the new tab page” of the “Get started” settings tab, as well as in the “Extensions” tab. Note also that the message appearing under the “Open new tab page” tab is “Labrador Retriever HD Dog & Puppy Wallpaper is controlling this setting (Manage)/(Disable)”. However, this message type does not appear for any theme downloaded for the Brave browser running on my Laptop.
I hope the above information is clear and helps resolve this issue. Please get back to me if you have any questions or would like me to try any workarounds.
Thank you,
Tom Rhodes
@fairmarketvalue thanks for the information. I just tried and it seems to have no issues. I tested using the theme at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/colorful-galaxy/eaabbbedehhbogefnfdakijemlefkkeh
I tried looking for your Labrador Retriever HD Dog & Puppy Wallpaper but it yielded no results. So I then went to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/labrador-retriever/clgglfohgmjipafplndcfgffinfpcopd
What I noticed with both of these are that the themes are installing and it at least changes the exterior of the browser. However, if you’re just referencing to the idea that nothing is showing in the New Tab Page and there doesn’t seem to be a way to get it there. I’m not quite sure how to go about it.
I’m going to tag @CerealLover in case they might have any ideas over the weekend, but otherwise will be more of a @Mattches thing as he catches up this week. (Support generally not active on the weekend)
Stephen, many thanks for your help.
Best,
Tom Rhodes
@fairmarketvalue,
When testing this I actually stumbled across an old thread on this same subject that I responded to 
Unfortunately, in this theme I stated that his would be fixed after the NTP we were working on [at that time] and that clearly has not aged well, as it looks like the issue remains. Unless there is some specific configuration I’m unaware of, the NTP setting in Brave seems to override anything that the theme/extension is attempting to display on the NTP. I think this is best exemplified in this example, where I went to Appearance --> New Tab Page --> New Tab Page Shows and selected Blank page in Brave and applied the Damnation Creek Trail theme, which resulted in this:
I will ask the team about this as, in my opinion, there should be an additional option in one of these places where you can select Theme and display the image(s) that the current theme has set for the NTP.
Went ahead and opened this to hopefully get it some attention:
I have noticed that Chrome themes no longer work well in Brave for macOS, notice the result of using this theme:
Particularly note the ends of the tabs, which I’m seeing happen a lot:
Eg,:
Mattches,
Thank you for your reply. If I correctly understood your message, you agree that NTP code is still overriding any themes I may want to add to the browser. Effectively, this means (to me) that no themes are available, at least on a full page basis. It shouldn’t be rocket science to modify the NTP code to allow full page implementation of themes, and I request that Brave support implement same promptly.
Sincerely,
Thomas Rhodes
(fairmarketvalue)
It seems so strange given that this used to work just fine!
I agree. On my older PC, I loaded Brave and themes several years ago with no problems. Obviously an update broke that capability, and it’s never been fixed since, despite multiple reports of the issue. Doesn’t Brave care?
Best,
Tom Rhodes
Brave cares, but they are also limited on staff. Like Support is pretty much just Steeven, Mattches, Evan123, and Saltybanana. I know there’s at least 1-2 others behind the scenes, but that’s about it. So around 5 employees to handle all the support issues and tickets for millions of users.
It’s a similar notion when it comes to developers. Those numbers are much higher, but when you consider the number of things being done…there’s just not enough developers to handle all of the issues and projects.
If you look at how many contributors there are on Brave’s Github, you’ll see from 2016 to now that there have only been 86 people. Not all of them are actually employed with Brave and just about half of them have only made 1 commit. I’m looking at https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/graphs/contributors for those numbers.
Then when you look at https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues you can see there are 6,594 open issues. And it’s not like those things are quick and easy to solve. It all takes time to analyze code, figure out what’s wrong, and then adjust code to fix.
In regards to themes not working, it looks like they added it to P5 (Priority 5) which is a backlog, which means Not scheduled. Don't anticipate work on this any time soon.. If you go through things for Front End, which is where they have labeled the Github created by Mattches, you’ll see they have more over 200 other projects being worked on:
5 in progress
51 on deck
1 backlog for P1 and P2
28 for P3 backlog
130 P4 backlog
150 P5 backlog.
67 untriaged backlog.
It does just come down to them constantly having to prioritize and sort through things. I don’t know the criteria that they use when assigning priority labels, but I’m assuming they do it based on how many users it’s impacting, the severity of the issue (crashes obviously priority of cosmetic), how much time/effort it will take to fix, if it might be coming as an upstream fix, length of time since the issue was reported etc.
Let’s face it, your issue is purely cosmetic, very few people seem to be complaining about it, and the issue is fairly new (when you consider some things were reported even years ago). So it just means that it may be a lower priority compared to a lot of other things being built into the browser or other bugs that have been reported.
While I appreciate everything you have written, the point is it was working and now it doesn’t. For me, yes, something ‘cosmetic’ is important and I haven’t noticed anything else that has suddenly stopped working while using Brave. We spend so much of our lives on our devices that whether it is just using ‘dark theme’ to rest our eyes or wanting to have something that we enjoying seeing and using is not a small thing.
I take your point. At the same time, I won’t look for any fixes for this issue.
Best,
Tom Rhodes
Big issue here is everyone reporting an issue is doing so because it matters to them. And you’re right, it might be a big thing for the two of you. Guess just saying when you consider the millions of users and thousands of issues to be worked on, how important is it in the grand scheme of things for all users and for the browser itself? That’s actually not an easy question to answer and opinions will vary.
I’m sure it will be fixed eventually. But yeah, looking to think it will be a quick fix likely would not be realistic. Not saying it can’t or won’t end up getting an uplift and change priority as people look over things, but current status just has it on the low end.
@Mattches I know I was being more direct/blunt in this and my prior comment. But is there any advice or thoughts on how people might try to get things, like this topic, set to a higher priority? And would it be right to say that based on it’s P5 backlog, that the chances of it happening any time soon is pretty slim?
The best way to get attention to any issue is to comment on it (in Github) once it’s been filed. It’s one thing for me to link Community threads, Twitter comments, reddit posts, etc. to the Github issue but it’s another thing to have users actively commenting and asking for it.
That’s probably the best move. I’ve already gone ahead and added this thread to the Github issue and will continue to add any other reports.
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