Description of the issue: How can this issue be reproduced?
Randomly occurs since the latest normal Release and Beta release
alt-tabbing back to the browser, opening new tabs, attempting to load websites, etc.
Can occur as soon as opening the browser after rebooting
Expected result:
This issue started occurring since March 2023, beta has the same problem after switching, freezing the entire system should not happen
Brave Version( check About Brave):
v1.50.114
Additional Information:
Audio keeps playing in the background, but the entire system is unresponsive, no keyboard or mouse input works, unable to access task manager.
Windows 11 64-bit, latest update
64gb RAM, AMD Ryzen 12 core, Nvidia 2070 super
3 monitors
Hardware acceleration disabled has no effect
I usually keep 20-30 tabs open, several windows.
This continues to be an issue, I managed to avoid a crash one time by being able to bring up task manager and kill the process, but most of the time it locks up before that’s possible.
@rgadiy just now seeing this topic. On my phone and headed for bed so won’t be a thorough reply, but do a favor and answer the following:
Are you using extensions? If so, try disabling. Or try clean browser profiles with no changes to setting and no extensions.
Have you checked for updates to your drivers lately?
I know based on your original post you mentioned it can happen under a variety of circumstances. But is it more likely to happen when you access videos compared to anything else? If so, I might suggest you go to brave://flags and enable Vulkan to see if it helps
Does the browser or your operating system ever crash? Or does it only freeze?
The extensions I’ve been using haven’t changed in over a year, the issue started occuring a month ago. I will try disabling them but the crashes also happen in private tabs with no extensions.
drivers are always up to date
It seems to happen more consistently when trying to save images, the right-click menu will freeze when popping up.
The browser crashes first, audio keeps playing, mouse can still be moved, games keep running, but nothing is clickable, and then a few seconds later everything freezes with audio still playing.
Still an ongoing problem, had two more freeze crashes today, one from a website location check and one just from logging into Windows after sleep mode.
Figured you resolved, as I know you never did respond after you mentioned that you would try disabling extensions.
Which if that happens, you should have some crash reports at brave://crashes. Make sure to go there and that they are sent. If not, hit Send Now. Then copy/paste the Uploaded crash report ID here.
Beyond that, you could always try more of the basic troubleshooting as mentioned, like new profile. (which I don’t think you said you tried yet).
I have tried disabling extensions and needed time to test it, the issue still occurs, including with private tabs.
The issue was originally occuring in the standard browser version, creating a new profile in the Beta version did not solve the problem.
There are no crash logs in brave://crashes/, probably because the program itself never enters a crashed state that restarts, it freezes, unresponsive to key or mouse input, and then a few seconds later the rest of the computer freezes as well, requiring a forced restart. I can’t task manager or ctrl+alt+delete out of it.
I have also tried an add-on for suspending unused tabs, but the issue still occurs, most commonly with right-click saving anything, but seemingly random still. It only occurs when actively using the browser.
Again, this happened after an update a few months ago. It involves basic functionality of the browser which is somehow freezing the whole system in Windows 11. Maybe that’s a windows problem or maybe it’s a browser problem, but as you said without a crash log that’s hard to trace. I can see if Event Viewer pulls up anything next time it happens.
It happens intermittently enough that it’s not an immediate problem, but it does keep happening once a day or so.
Unfortunately I’m not entirely sure what to do here. I’m tempted to ask if you’re sure that this issue is specific to Brave — that is, are you seeing this same behavior occur if you’re using other browsers or even just other software? Might be worth testing for an hour or so and see if you can produce a crash using your PC normally except with a different browser.
A reinstall might be worth trying here as well. You can do a “soft” reinstall where you retain your browsing data but simply reinstall the browser itself. To do this, try the following (note that you can try this on Beta, the stable version or both but I’d start with one or the other first — I’ll be referring to the Brave Stable version in the example below)
In Windows, go to C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User data and make a safe copy of this folder (this is just to be safe, copy it to your desktop or something)
Once you’ve made the safe copy, go ahead and uninstall the browser normally (go to Add/remove programs Windows app) — elect not to delete any browsing data for now when prompted
Then reinstall the browser and test again.
Let me know if the above process makes any difference for you.