Brave for Mac OS doesn't save any logged in sessions upon restart

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1

Description of the issue:

When I quit and open Brave again on my Mac (Tahoe 26.4, M3 MacBook Air) it loses all saved sessions, I need to log into every single website I use.
How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Open Brave, open a website

  2. Log into a website

  3. Quit Brave

  4. Start Brave again, open the same website

Expected result:
I am still logged in.

Brave Version( check About Brave):
Brave 1.88.138 (Official Build) (arm64)
Chromium: 146.0.7680.178

Additional Information:
macOS 26.4 (Build 25E246) — stable, non-beta
fresh Brave install, no backup restore, no managed policies, no security/cleanup tools

I checked all user-facing settings that could obvipusly cause that - they’re all set correctly.

  • The Cookies SQLite database at ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Cookies exists but is always empty — querying it while logged into sites returns no rows

  • The file never changes size or timestamp during or after a browsing session

  • fs_usage monitoring showed Brave never touches any cookie-related file during login

  • Brave attempts to access ~/Library/HTTPStorages/com.brave.Browser.binarycookies on launch but never creates or writes to it

  • Manually creating the binarycookies file does not help — it remains 0 bytes

  • The ~/Library/HTTPStorages/com.brave.Browser/ directory exists and contains httpstorages.sqlite which does get written to, but this is not cookie storage

  • No “clear on exit” settings enabled, no relevant flags in Preferences, no policy files present

  • The NetworkService process runs with --service-sandbox-type=network — suspected interaction with macOS 26 sandbox restrictions

Conclusion Brave’s NetworkService sandbox appears to be preventing cookie writes to disk entirely on macOS 26. Chrome, which uses the same Chromium base, is unaffected.

2

Hmmm interesting. I haven’t seen any other reports quite like this lately and I’m not seeing this issue on my end using same OS and the latest stable build so I don’t expect that this is a general/wide spread issue with the browser.

Can you open macOS System Settings > Privacy & Security and quickly confirm that Brave has permissions to access files and folders? Additionally, I’d be interested to see if you get the same behavior in the Beta build – would you mind testing this?

3

@einberliner

Monitoring Brave Browser cookie status

  1. Upper left, is Brave Browser New Window, at https:www.google.com
  2. Lower left, opened a Developer Tools window for that (1)
  3. Reloaded https:www.google.com
  4. Selected in DevTools window: Application tab
  5. Selected in DevTools window: Storage > Cookies [source]
  6. Upper right, opened Brave Browser New Window > brave://history
  7. Lower right, opened Brave Browser New Window > brave://settings/content/all (notice n cookies count)
  8. Sequence to then follow:
    a) Reload https:www.google.com
    b) Reload brave://history
    c) Reload brave://settings/content/all
    d) Select DevTools window

When you reload the www.google.com website, then the brave://history and brave://settings/content/all both need to be reloaded. While the DevTools window will automatically update ← or at least, it should update.

Monitoring_Brave_Browser_cookie_status
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