Brave seems to be crashing system w/YouTube

Brave Browser
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1

hi all-

for several months, Brave (1.93.129) seems to be cratering my memory on MacOS (Tahoe 26.5.2) whenever I have YouTube open. It’s been happening for several months, maybe more, across current and past MacOSs and Brave versions.

sometimes it’s as simple as an extended time (2-8 seconds) to maximize the player window to fullscreen, sometimes it freezes the entire machine. it’s irrespective of whether i have a video playing (even happens occasionally at the Mac’s login window. sometimes i get the rainbow wheel of death when trying to open, close, or change tabs.

several times in the past few months a Brave update completely fixes the issue. sometimes it doesn’t help at all or reduces the severity of the freezes.

i can’t even be 100% sure it’s youtube related because i so often watch the platform, but it seems to be the lowest common denominator. by the time i get activity monitor open the problem has passed. i have no more than 12 tabs open at any given time, which i perceive is not many on average, and the only plugin i use is lastpass.

any help would be appreciated.

2

One quick thing to try that is known to cause issues is the Graphics acceleration setting in Brave. Try launching Brave, go to Settings > System and toggle Use graphics acceleration[...] “off”.

Relaunch when prompted and test agian.

3

this is interesting - thank you, by the way - because i have turned this off in the past but am determined to solve this so went and checked, and it was on again. i turned it off, restarted, and not only were none of the problems fixed but full screen playback was stuttering endlessly. thanks for the suggestion.

4

Can you tell me if this only occurs in Brave? Or do any other Chromium based browsers have this behavior?

5

i don’t, but i suppose i can try the exxperiment for a time if that wou;d help diagnose. what i CAN tell you is i use brave on win11 for work and don’t have these problems, with a similar number of open tabs, same one plugin, and watching youtube. the only differences are i’m working so don’t maximize the viewer window and i’m not on MacOS.

6

That definitely doesn’t sound normal. Since it’s happening across multiple Brave and macOS versions, I’d be curious whether hardware acceleration is the culprit. Have you tried disabling it in Brave’s settings to see if the freezes stop?

7

i did disable it. it seemed to shorten the freeze going in and out of full screen but when full screen youtube stuttered like crazy and the system freezes were less common but still occurred. thanks for replying and for any additional thoughts