Description of the issue: cannot open Brave on MacOS (Tahoe 26.6.2 on Apple M3 Pro chip) without Brave crashing immediately and giving the error “Brave Browser quit unexpectedly.”
How can this issue be reproduced?
Open the browser
It crashes immediately
Expected result: I expect Brave to open and work normally
Brave Version( check About Brave): 153.1.95.101 (based on the .dmg installer as I cannot open Brave at all to check)
Additional Information:
Happens immediately and cannot open the browser at all. I have tried:
Restarting my computer
Updating my computer (to MacOS Tahoe 26.6.2)
Uninstalling and reinstalling Brave with the Brave-Browser folder backed up
Uninstalling and reinstalling Brave fresh without the backup
Can you try launching Terminal and running /Applications/Brave\ Browser.app/Contents/MacOS/Brave\ Browser --user-data-dir=/tmp/brave-temp-profile which should allow you to launch with a guest profile.
Thanks for such a fast reply. Yes, that worked. Now what can I do to open Brave normally with all of my previous settings, bookmarks, and customizations?
I navigated to my Default profile folder (I never set up specific profiles) and tried deleting all of the extensions within the Extensions folder, but Brave still isn’t opening. Do you have any other suggestions?
Launch Brave normally and it will create a fresh Default folder
If it works, the issue is in the old profile. You can copy specific items back (bookmarks, etc.) from Default.bak, but not sensitive data like passwords.
“One more data point that might help narrow this down: if you haven’t already, pulling the actual crash report from Console.app (or ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports) and sharing the Exception Type + crashed thread would give a concrete signal instead of trial-and-error. Also — separately from the extension/profile troubleshooting — there’s a similar-sounding resolved case (community.brave.app/t/brave-keep-crashes-on-mac-it-wont-even-open/643426) where re-downloading fresh from brave.com/download (without uninstalling first) fixed an identical ‘quit unexpectedly on launch’ crash on Tahoe. Might be worth trying if the other steps don’t pan out.” Reality Auditor
Two things I can’t verify, so please don’t take this as a confirmed match:
Whether your crash is actually the same failure - I have no way to compare symptoms without a crash report from your side.
Your “Brave Version” field (153.1.95.101, from the .dmg) uses a different version-number format than the 1.82.x/1.83.x in that report, and I haven’t found a reliable way to map one to the other - so I can’t say whether that specific fix even applies to your build.
If you can get the crash report from Console.app (Exception Type + top frames of the crashing thread), that would let us actually compare this against #49861 instead of guessing from version numbers alone.
It looks like most threads from 0-37 have errors (except for 1, 2, 4, 5) and the corresponding text is quite extensive. I’m not sure that pasting it all here would be appropriate. Is there a better way to get the crash report to you?
As far as the other case linked, I am not sure it is the same issue. It looks like for that individual the problem is a single profile is an issue while the other profiles work. In my case, no profiles seem to work.
I GOT THIS PART WRONG → There is no Brave Browser version 153.1.95.101…
Correctly, command line: defaults read /Applications/Brave\ Browser.app/Contents/Info.plist CFBundleShortVersionString will return that (153.1.95.101) form of Brave Browser bundle version.
The only Brave Browser stable release .dmg installer files are:
I did download from the official links. When I right click on the application in the .dmg file, that is what shows up as the version number. I assume it is the same because the last three numbers are the same as the correct version number.
Note to self: Instead of Apple’s M silicon speed performance marketing sales “benchmark” …
A practical M + Chromium scorecard
Metric
What we’d measure
CPU overhead
Average + peak CPU with normal tabs
GPU overhead
GPU utilization during scrolling/video
Temperature
Idle, browsing, video, web apps
Fan behavior
RPM / audible fan activation
Battery drain
%/hour under defined workload
Responsiveness
Scroll/input latency and visible stutter
Tab stability
Crashes, renderer hangs, tab reloads
Video stability
Dropped frames / freezes
Memory pressure
RAM/swap with realistic tab counts
Sleep/wake
Browser recovery after sleep
External displays
60/120-Hz scrolling and video behavior
Long-run degradation
Does the machine become progressively hotter/slower?
Test Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi. Compare with Firefox and Safari.
Re Chromium, M is not patient, and Chromium struggles to comply. M is a racehorse. Chromium is a plowhorse workload.
Apple Silicon is designed around very high performance per watt and tightly integrated hardware/software. Chromium, by contrast, has to serve an enormous range of platforms and workloads … and that fits-all (somewhere) is not satisfactorily tuned for M.
Chromium doesn’t always keep up with the efficiency and responsiveness envelope of Apple Silicon on MacOS.
Chromium has an enormous collection of capabilities - Blink, V8, Skia, Viz, GPU process, networking, sandboxing, extensions, codecs, compositor, etc. - but there isn’t a mechanism that says:
“I’m running on this particular M-series Mac, under this particular MacOS version, with this particular workload. Assemble the optimal browser configuration for this machine right now.”
Totally understand not wanting to paste 38 threads worth of text — that would be way too much, and most of it isn’t needed anyway.
What would actually help: just the “Exception Type” line, plus the top ~10-15 frames of the crashing thread (the one Console.app marks as “Crashed Thread” near the top of the report, not threads 0-37 individually). That’s usually enough to tell whether this matches #49861 or is something else entirely.
If even that’s more than you want to paste inline, a quick paste to a site like gist.github.com or pastebin.com and dropping the link here works just as well — totally up to you, no pressure either way.
@cap296 can you update to the latest available version and let me know if this is still happening? If so, please confirm the version #, and share the Crash Report IDs which can be found at Brave://crashes.