Brave on android after update became unbearable slow, it's practically unusable now

[SergeantGrimes]

As I’ve said in this thread that I still got no replies - PLEASE implement a PROPER Tabs backup + sharing feature - Brave Browser - Brave Community , I have plenty of tabs and recent update made brave so slow to switch between tabs that it practically takes 60-70 seconds, even more than before.

Description of the issue: I was unfortunate and google play, despite auto-updates are turned off, download brave update for android and it greatly ruined everything for me perfomance wise. It made switching tabs within a single group from 0.5 to 1 second to take whopping 20-30 seconds. I got recent update today and it make everything even slower, 60-70 seconds!!! This is just insane, it makes brave literally unusable and I plan to switch the browser to anything else before this issue is fixed.

All of the tabs are crucial to me and I don’t want to close them all, even bookmarking is not a solution because it is crucial that all of the tabs remain in the EXACT position as they are right now on my phone. I’m afraid of doing downgrade because I might lose them by accident. So please, do not tell me to closet the tabs or delete the cache

Steps to Reproduce: just create a tiny group of tabs, even mere having 2 tabs withing a group will take me 60-90 seconds to switch between them, even if I switch between tabs I already been minute ago.

2. The worst part is, I cannot touch screen at all during these 60-90 seconds of waiting to switch between tabs. If I accidently touch screen, the whole browser crash, and I have to wait 15 minutes just to load all of the tabs again in their correct order.

Actual Result: literally unsuable. Waiting over a minute just to switch tab is not ideal at all. Some people seem to have similar problem at Brave Browser Android takes 4 seconds longer than other Android browsers to respond to a website and load it - Brave Browser / Mobile Support - Brave Community but turning off Safe Browsing flag did not help at all.

Reproduces how often: always, and it’s very depressing… I am forced to not open brave anymore because I am afraid to lose all of these tabs and I cannot use brave anymore because it is too slow.

Important note: Before the update, I download brave from google play from around january 2026 I believe, or at worst at december of 2025. Before then, all of the tab switching was almost immediate. Even if the group had 4000 tabs or more, switching between them was fast and safe. It did not crash either, except rarely unless website was too big to handle. Now, it is too slow, and it’s too easy to crash.

If the issue in the chromium engine itself, then I’m afraid the newer update won’t fix it but make things only worse and worse for me so I am asking two, very important things:

1. How to safely downgrade my brave brwoser for android to an older version that could handle lots of tabs quickly without crashing? As I said, it’s important that I do NOT close them and preserve them in exact position and order as they are now, so bookmarking is NOT a solution.

2. PLEASE implement a feature to ACHIEVE and SHARE\SYNCRHONIZE the numerous amount of tabs (and groups) in the exact correct order that doesn’t shuffle them. So then I could just share all these tabs on another phone if things going bad, or just extract file on my phone’s storage and can load it anytime later if things going wrong. This will make me less scared to open brave in fear of losing tabs.

Operating System and Brave Version: Funtouch OS 14 the latest version of brave from the Google Play. (1.92.136)

Additional Information: How do I downgrade my brave to old version back when everything did work just perfectly fine without losing all of the numerous amount of opened tabs? It’s very important to me. The recent misfortune that happened to me where phone updated brave without my consent has greatly devastated me and left me very depressed and stressful…

[Mattches]

@SergeantGrimes I wish I had better news for you here.

@SergeantGrimes

1. How to safely downgrade my brave brwoser for android to an older version that could handle lots of tabs quickly without crashing? As I said, it’s important that I do NOT close them and preserve them in exact position and order as they are now, so bookmarking is NOT a solution.

There are a litany of reasons you should not downgrade but for your specific situation, downgrading might actually cause the very issue you’re trying to avoid (losing your tabs/tab state).

@SergeantGrimes

2. PLEASE implement a feature to ACHIEVE and SHARE\SYNCRHONIZE the numerous amount of tabs (and groups) in the exact correct order that doesn’t shuffle them. So then I could just share all these tabs on another phone if things going bad, or just extract file on my phone’s storage and can load it anytime later if things going wrong. This will make me less scared to open brave in fear of losing tabs.

We do have Brave Sync for this – however, it will not function the way you want it to, nor will any browser’s tab/data sync at least not that I know of). Once you Sync your tabs from one browser/device to another device, when you go to open those tabs, they’re going to load fresh as it is the first time the browser [on the new device] will open those tabs. Although some data may carry over, the exact state is not preserved (again, this would be the case for most browser’s sync services – I just tested this with Firefox and Chrome and can confirm that that is the case).

I’m not entirely clear why your browser is running so poorly, but I suspect that the solution will again involve the very thing you want to avoid – clearing cache/data, closing/reopening your tabs (or perhaps resource intensive ones). A few questions regarding the performance:

1. Can you please clarify exactly when this issue started? Was it only after the most recent update or has this been happening for a while?
2. Do you see any of your other browsers performing similarly or do they run normally?
3. Is it just websites/tab interactions that run slow or is it the entire browser? For example if you tap on the menu and view/navigate through settings, do these internal pages also exhibit the same slow performance?

[SergeantGrimes]

@Mattches

There are a litany of reasons you should not downgrade but for your specific situation, downgrading might actually cause the very issue you’re trying to avoid (losing your tabs/tab state).

This is sound really depressing, but downgrading seems like the only solution I might have to make sure brave no longer lags like it does now…

@Mattches

We do have Brave Sync for this – however, it will not function the way you want it to, nor will any browser’s tab/data sync at least not that I know of). Once you Sync your tabs from one browser/device to another device, when you go to open those tabs, they’re going to load fresh as it is the first time the browser [on the new device] will open those tabs. Although some data may carry over, the exact state is not preserved (again, this would be the case for most browser’s sync services – I just tested this with Firefox and Chrome and can confirm that that is the case).

I know, and this is exactly the reason I made this thread to begin with - PLEASE implement a PROPER Tabs backup + sharing feature - Brave Browser - Brave Community

All I am asking is for BASIC function to transfer the tabs in EXACT order, groups and chronology they been set. I REALLY don’t want it to be a mess of opened tabs and and messed up order. In fact, I would really appreciate if it could also transfer the cache from phone to other phone or simply extract it from from inaccessible folder on the goddamn android phone. All this feature could do is copy the EXACT folder of the /data/data/com.brave.browser/app_tabs and either save it on your phone’s accessible storage or share it over to other phone - thus you could get a SAFE backup prepared in case something goes terribly wrong. Brave doesn’t need to be a firefox or chrome perfect clone when it could be a much better browser.
I really regret that I couldn’t just root my phone in time… If I did root my phone, I could just get to /data/data/com.brave.browser/app_tabs and save it myself, and all this stress and depression could have been avoided…

@Mattches

I’m not entirely clear why your browser is running so poorly, but I suspect that the solution will again involve the very thing you want to avoid – clearing cache/data, closing/reopening your tabs (or perhaps resource intensive ones).

This is the exact thing I absolutely want to avoid.

@Mattches

1. Can you please clarify exactly when this issue started? Was it only after the most recent update or has this been happening for a while?

Exactly two days ago. The brave just download the update from google play without my consent, the version it update to was (1.91.180) despite the fact the autoupdate was disabled (I really hate how intrusively brave demands me to update this, it really needs to be turned off). The moment I opened my brave, the tabs started to lag a lot, simple switching between tabs started to take 10-30 seconds. Today I download an update, the (1.92.136) and it made much worse and now it takes 60-90 seconds to switch between tabs…

Before the update, I used brave for maybe 7-8 months and it all worked fine, it all load these tabs relatively fast and didn’t freeze my phone, didn’t crash either. It took me 0.5-1 second or literally instantly to switch between tabs without any issues, even if the group of tabs had ~4000 websites running.

@Mattches

2. Do you see any of your other browsers performing similarly or do they run normally?

They work perfectly normal, it’s the brave that is the issue. The updated brave, to be exact.

@Mattches

3. Is it just websites/tab interactions that run slow or is it the entire browser? For example if you tap on the menu and view/navigate through settings, do these internal pages also exhibit the same slow performance?

Yes, only tabs, not even website. Switching between tabs even within small group of tabs takes 60-90 seconds, it’s unbearable slow and I do switch between all of my tabs A LOT, so this is very, VERY important to me. It also takes 60-90 seconds to “login with google” since it opens NEW tab. And if I dare to touch screen during these seconds lags - the whole browser crash. The settings menu doesn’t lag, the websites don’t lag either, but switching between tabs freezes my device for about 60-90 seconds.

This whole thing is really depressing for me and caused me a lot of stress. I am afraid that the only solution is to downgrade. If nothing else can be done or no update is coming to fix my issue for people who have plenty of tabs opened, this means I won’t be able to use brave anymore…

This is exactly why I am asking for a NEW FEATURE that PROPERLY copies and extracts the opened tabs either on your phone accessible folder (without root rights) and\or can be shared to new phone, this way I would feel a lot more safe doing downgrade if it’s my only solution that I am left with… This is a pretty useful feature that I ask for, since bookmarking isn’t going to do it properly for you.

[Mattches]

I’m not sure what I can do for you here given the restrictions you’re imposing. As for the “new feature”, you’re more or less asking for a solution to this that would require an entirely new functionality with respect to Sync (we are working on Sync v3 but again I’m not even sure if that would suffice here) and even if we did decide to implement it, it would not be trivial nor would it be expedient – so you would be stuck in this state until then regardless.

Moving away from the Sync overhaul and focusing on what we can do right now, I suspect that the issue does have to do with either bad cache data or the amount of tabs you have open at this time. There are a couple things we can check here to see if we can narrow down the cause of the issue.

The first thing is to check what resources the Brave app is using on your device while open. While I’m not familiar with the OS you’re using, it seems like there is something called “iManager” on your device that you can use to view device activity and resource allocation. You’ll want to launch Brave, then minimize it and open the iManager app on your device, then check and see how much Memory Brave is using (there may be other useful resource data too). See if it is using an unusually high amount and share the results with me here (feel free to include screenshots if necessary).

The second thing I’m interested to see is if there’s some issue/conflict/incompatibility with your device/OS and Brave. To do this without interfering with your current install, go to the Google Play Store and download the Brave Beta build. Downloading and installing Beta will not overwrite or interact with your current install in any way – it will essentially just install as a separate browser. Once installed, open Beta and visit some sites/browse normally for a few minutes and check to see if the Beta also have poor performance.

[SergeantGrimes]

@Mattches

I’m not sure what I can do for you here given the restrictions you’re imposing. As for the “new feature”, you’re more or less asking for a solution to this that would require an entirely new functionality with respect to Sync (we are working on Sync v3 but again I’m not even sure if that would suffice here) and even if we did decide to implement it, it would not be trivial nor would it be expedient – so you would be stuck in this state until then regardless.

okay… this is honestly very sad to hear… I guess I should stop using brave till then if nothing else can be done to simply extract the tabs data on my phone\pc or share with other phone…
Though, I don’t believe this has to be a hard to implement feature, all it should do is allow the user to access the com.brave.browser/app_tab and the rest of the cache without needing the root rights… This way I could just copy the entire com.brave.browser folder and save it either on my phone’s storage or PC as a backup… Then, if you lose all the tabs, you could just copy the backup com.brave.browser/app_tab and paste it on your’s phone /data/data/com.brave.browser directory…

I am desperate enough, I might even donate for such feature if there is nothing else can be done… I am really scared to lose all of the ~20000 tabs that did work just perfectly before the update… I don’t see why shouldn’t you be able to access your Brave’s cache\tabs on your phone when you can do this easily on PC…

@Mattches

I suspect that the issue does have to do with either bad cache data

I doubt it’s the bad cache data itself, because all the tabs are there, and all the groups with tabs as well.

@Mattches

or the amount of tabs you have open at this time.

Chances are the new brave is run on new awful chrome engine that forces the phone to check all of the tabs despite I am clicking few ones within a group at certain time. It probably acts as if it checks this certain tab within the ~20000 tabs that I have opened at the moment. There is no flags to make chrome stop doing it, so it acts like it did before and don’t check all of the tabs before opening one certain tab, just opens one tabs and that’s it. Before the update there was SLIGHT lag within a group of 1750 tabs, a slightly more lag (like took 0.5 second to open a new tab) on 4000 tab group, but nothing insane like 90 seconds wait time, nor did it crash when I switched between tabs before.

@Mattches

While I’m not familiar with the OS you’re using, it seems like there is something called “iManager”

I have no idea what is “iManager”, and I stated my OS in the OP - Funtouch OS 14, the phone is Vivo Y28

@Mattches

You’ll want to launch Brave, then minimize it and open the iManager app on your device, then check and see how much Memory Brave is using (there may be other useful resource data too).

I am really scared to do this thing, as I am afraid to lose either tabs or loaded cache that my phone is currently using…

Again, I want to highlight that the older version of Brave did work perfectly, and it’s the primary reason I want to do downgrade.

@Mattches

To do this without interfering with your current install, go to the Google Play Store and download the Brave Beta build. Downloading and installing Beta will not overwrite or interact with your current install in any way – it will essentially just install as a separate browser.

Before I do this, I want to be 100% sure. If I manage to find and install the Brave Beta build, it will NOT in any shape or form interact with the CURRENT cache, tabs, etc of the official Brave build from Google Play and have separate folder, thus it won’t overwrite the data\cache\tabs of the current Brave I have installed, right???

[Ramza]

This was the situation I was facing months ago and It got so bad I just swapped browsers broski. Im just returning every now and then to check for solutions and archive tabs before the b*tch crashes. It seems like every update past january has fcked the apps performance up more and more and Im just done at this point. smh

[Ramza]

20k damn dude I was at 7k and have closed about 2k and its STILL crashing. You may be more cooked than I am on these versions…

[SergeantGrimes]

@Mattches

“iManager”

I still don’t know what is “iManager” is, I don’t think my phone has anything like this.

@Mattches

The second thing I’m interested to see is if there’s some issue/conflict/incompatibility with your device/OS and Brave.

I’ve also noticed that on this version of brave that I have now, a very long pages also tend to freeze a lot. Be that imageboard websites or bulletinboard forums, if I click the image’s thumbnail it tends to freeze for few seconds, sometimes up to 7-10 seconds, and load them even longer. Never happened on older version before the god damned update.

In short, it really feels like the new version of brave using some untested garbage chromium engine that doesn’t work well on phones for intense use.

@Mattches

Downloading and installing Beta will not overwrite or interact with your current install in any way – it will essentially just install as a separate browser. Once installed, open Beta and visit some sites/browse normally for a few minutes and check to see if the Beta also have poor performance.

I am STILL waiting for your response on this question, so I can feel 100% safe that I won’t mess anything up if I download beta. PLEASE answer these questions to ease me at my concerns of safety of my tabs:

@SergeantGrimes

Before I do this, I want to be 100% sure. If I manage to find and install the Brave Beta build, it will NOT in any shape or form interact with the CURRENT cache, tabs, etc of the official Brave build from Google Play and have separate folder, thus it won’t overwrite the data\cache\tabs of the current Brave I have installed, right???

[Mattches]

Beta is a separate app and browser. It literally has no interaction with your current Brave installation. It will be as if you downloaded Edge or Firefox. I have users perform this type of test all the time and I do it myself as well.

[SergeantGrimes]

I still have the same issue on the vanila brave… probably because update forces it to check all the tabs, and that’s bad… it’s less laggy when I’m at the beginning of pages though…