Description of the issue: Brave News causing excessive CPU usage How can this issue be reproduced?
Open New Tab in an entire window (mine is a 24" monitor in portrait mode)
Read and scroll
Expected result: normal CPU usage
Brave Version( check About Brave):v1.96.59 (Sep 24, 2026)
Additional Information:
Let me say that I LOVE Brave News. I do and did add a boatload of channels, my sources, etc. That’s also something I like a lot. WAY better than say Gargle Gnus. What I didn’t like is that while scanning the articles, at some point, my system shut down due to thermal overload.
I have a CPU temp indicator in my conky, so the next time I started the system, I repeated the process of starting up Brave News full screen in my big portrait mode monitor. It didn’t take long to notice the temperature rising, rising, rising. I noted that if I opened an article, the temperature usually would lower and stabilize, but when that page was closed (Ctrl-W), the temps would start rising again.
I don’t know what Brave settings might help fix this, but it’s not hardware acceleration.
Thanks for being Brave! Hope someone can help, otherwise I’ll probably go back to Vivaldi (it has an email client feature that’s great).
First off … it’s never mentioned which distro is being used .. and also, the DE being used.
Also, did this issue arise after some “event”?
(or always?)
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Let’s squelch one thought … the physical size of a monitor does not make a web browser more demanding on your CPU or GPU. (it’s the underlying hardware and the DE you’re using, and content that is demanding).
I tested using a Dell UltraSharp 38 inch (and 49") Curved monitor … no issues. Of course, I never use Brave News, except for this test.
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So let’s consider the other information given:
I’d say THAT’S the most contributing issue. It’s no telling what the heck is constantly running in the background.
Brave News is essentially a local RSS aggregator that dynamically downloads, updates, and formats massive amounts of content.
So, if you have a “boatload of channels”, that certainly contributes to the excessive usage.
A large number of custom channels, RSS feeds, or content sources, Brave will continue to work in the background to simultaneously fetch and index those updates. (size of monitor doesn’t matter).
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(sidenote: I’ve been using Brave (mostly the Beta release, plus the Stable) for about four years with no excessive C|G/PU usage).
W-e-e-l-l-sir, you do make some good points. First, I’m currently running this on the latest Artix distro and running Openbox, so it’s a fairly light environment.
I’m sure you’re correct about the screen dimensions not being an issue (though I got to wondering if there was simply more to be rendered at once). I had two Brave windows already open, so I opened a third and of course that started a new tab and thus the enabled Brave News. I did a bit of scrolling down the news feeds and saw the temps get into the 60s. I moved the window up to my bigger vertical monitor and resized it to take up most of the monitor. I started doing some more scrolling, and the temps started going up again. When it got to around 85C, I opened the settings, exported my feeds, then started deleting them all. Closed the settings panel and got a notice that I had no feeds, BUT the temp was already up around 90C. I added CNN but that still didn’t have anything new. The temperature still kept creeping up, with NOTHING to show. Sheesh!!! I disabled Brave News and the temperature pretty immediately dropped back down into the 70s.
So I beg to differ – the number of feeds does not seem to be the problem.
I welcome any other comments and suggestions! And thanks very much for taking the time to reply!!!
It might be something happening only on Artix. Right now, I’m running on MX Linux 25.3 and have a Brave News window open with all my feeds, and the temperature has stayed nicely low (not cool by most standards, but low by my laptop’s standards).
The main difference I can think of is that I let the Artix system run with the performance governor (but with about a max CPU frequency about 2/3rds of max), and most other distros use schedutil or ondemand with similar max CPU freq settings. The Artix situation was interesting, when I let it run in performance mode with that freq cap, it generally stayed cooler than when I changed the governor and such to be like other distros. Weird. Maybe I’ll see what happens if I make the governor change again.
Hmmm… Okay, I’m back on Artix and it turns out I already had switched the governor to schedutil and applied other limits like those of MX Linux. Brave News in Artix still overheating as I scrolled down the feeds (same feeds on MX). In fact, temps are creeping up into the 90s, gotta shut it down. (Did it – fairly rapid drop in temp.)
Hope someone can help, otherwise I’ll probably go back to Vivaldi (it has an email client feature that’s great).