Just today, Brave starting using so much energy that my MacBook Pro M3 Max started overheating. Had to disable and go back to Chrome.
Does your issue have a similarity with some of the details in the description at(?):
Yes, quite close. But it doesnât need You Tube videos to happen. Simply sitting idle if a web page has any video at all, such as Wall Street Journal, Barrons, etc, running in a window, the CPU usage spikes to 100 - 150%, and the laptop get quite warm to the touch. It also happen with Chrome. But not with Safari. Safari typically runs at 97 - 99% idle.
Sadly, Iâd really like to use Brave for its handling of most web pages and ad suppression, especially You Tube.
I hope this helps.
Thanks for bringing me into this. I also would like to keep using Brave but am starting to think that I wonât be able to as I can not find a solution
I might use it for the few things it does really well, and shut it down otherwise, but not as a default browser.
Yeah Iâm in the exact same boat, I love Brave but itâs causing my machine to overheat and havenât yet found a solution apart from switching to Chrome.
I am adding 3 more MacOS-Brave Browser-users performance issues (sluggish, overheating, troubles with installing, updating), because of some questions I have about available disk space aka drive space on MacOS computers.
-Brave detected as InfoStealer in Mac Analytics Logs
-Brave crashing after update please help
To get started, please use the following Apple instructions for starting up the Mac in Recovery Mode, and then selecting the Disk Utility. With Disk Utility, select the boot volume of your Mac, that you usually use and has Brave Browser installed.
Be sure to choose the appropriate hardware - Apple Silicon or Intel - for your machine:
-https://support.apple.com/en-us/102518?choose-your-type-of-mac=mac-with-apple-silicon
[Hand writing:] Write down all the disk / drive data info that you see - all of it, in detail, and then report your findings.
Because, all of the issuesâ symptoms, can point to a lack of ACTUAL available disk / drive space. And, using the specific Disk Utility of the Recovery Mode, is your easier, more reliable procedure for getting the info.
YesâŚIâm running an M3 Max with 48 GB and 16 cores. And it overheats with any web page thatâs running a video. The case actually gets very warm to the touch. Chrome may not help if Brave is based on it. Safari doesnât seem to have the problem.
Yeah youâre right, Iâve had the crashing issues happen when I switch to Chrome too. It must be an upstream Chromium bug, also itâs not just YouTube, my system overheated when I hovered Instagram videos as well.
Regarding the power hogging, itâs a specific process within Brave â something like âBrave Content Helper (rendering)â. You can see it in MacOs âactivity monitorâ. When called, it runs the CPU to over 100% and holds it there. If you forcibly end the process, the CPU usage goes back to normal. For me, the problem has only come up recently. It might be from the latest upgrade, but itâs less than a week old.
Yeah for me itâs the same, Brave Content Helper (rendering) is the CPU hog and yes it began with a recent upgrade. But I do think it might be a Chromium thing because the same thing happened on Chrome and the activity monitor showed a similar process running but just the Chrome version.
You might be right about it being a Chromium thing. However, Chromium is an open source distribution, so, if theyâve got some decent coders, they should be able to fix it or get Google to. Because itâs so widely used, itâs hard to avoid the problem. I havenât seen it in Safari, but I have in Chrome, Opera, and Brave.
Hopefully Brave will see this thread.
I thought the same, however the same things then happened to me when using Safari. Also, it then happened when only using spotify and everything else was closed!
Can anyone here confirm whether or not disabling Graphics Acceleration resolves the issue? Settings --> System --> Graphics acceleration
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One thing to try. Safari lets you adjust settings for any specific web site. You can set it to prevent âauto playâ, so those videos they sometime embed wonât run, which might trigger the process.
I have found a solution. Brave is not the problem. Sometimes the operating system gets a bug and because Brave and Chrome are more CPU intensive than other browsers they can trigger the bug. Once the bug starts the computer goes into overdrive mode.
I spoke with Apple and they gave me instructions to re-install the operating system which can get rid of the bug. It has been about 5 days now and my mac is working fine with youtube and everything! The instructions are here:
Interesting. Do you think a regular update does the same thing? I have one waiting.
What you learned from Apple, is also why I posted earlier:
âBrave using too much power - #7 by 289wkâ
Around May 1st, I observed 2 events that led to the MacOS âgoing into overdrive:â
- I had just connected a later model (but used) Mac to Appleâs iCloud - and that event registered a notification on an older Mac
- That older Macâs Brave Browser just running at this Brave Community and not doing anything (âmerely at idleâ) . . . was in fact downloading a very large amount of data over approx. 1 minute
And almost immediately at the end of that download - cut short, because I Quit Brave Browser, because BB had seemed to go nuts, furiously downloading something . . . suddenly EVERYTHING on the older Mac, became sludge.
That led to my finally getting that older Mac started up from an attached, backup partition that I kept handy. And I discovered, that, the older Macâs Disk Utility claim of available disk space: 14 GB . . . was totally wrong.
In fact, the older Mac had only 815 MB of disk space remaining!
A process that I could not track down, on the older Mac, was producing multi-Gigabyte files, en masse - in an obscure sub-folder of the MacOS System directory. And for the next 2 days, I learned, that 50 Gigabytes of un-used disk space, is now the ânew minimum.â
Because . . . Operating Systems have adopted a practice of pre-emptively tackling an expectation of ârunning out of disk space.â By, suddenly taking, in rapid succession, large snapshots of the system (in general) in anticipation of a pending crash, failure.
The rate at which the MacOS (or some process) was eating up the hard drive, was approx. 50 Gigabytes per 5-7 minutes, in the com.apple.coresymbolicationd folder:
/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd
The somewhat-of-a-solution: I had to reformat the old Macâs drive; and I also had to reformat the later model Macâs drive, so that each of the Macs now has more than 100 Gigabytes of un-used disk space. And, I wrote an AppleScript that monitors the MacOSâs attic spaces, cache spaces, and tmp spaces for unusual growth. And, I put together a launchd plist file that deletes the accumulating, very large files in that com.apple.coresymbolicationd folder.
In brief, the AppleScript uses the du command.
Gents,
289wk â thanks of the detail. I just checked my storage and found nothing unusual â 87% of disk space still available. I do not use iCloud. And Iâve seen no large downloads as you described. Iâm running a MBP with M3 Max, and just updated to Sequoia 15.5.
Humdinger â After updating to Sequoia 15.5, I relaunched Brave. After two days, it appears the problem is gone. Idle time in Activity Monitor runs 97-99% with none of the power grabbing I saw before. So maybe the OS bug you mentioned is the root cause.
Thanks to all.
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Linux (Kubuntu 24.04) similar problem.
Brave 1.79.118 (Official Build) (64-bit) / Chromium: 137.0.7151.61
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3943 me 20 0 33.0g 2.3g 289164 S 100.0 3.8 72:44.86 brave
A 100% CPU Brave process remains indefinitely after Brave is closed.
- âContinue running background apps when Brave is closedâ is OFF.
- âUse graphics acceleration when availableâ ON or OFF, same issue.
Google Chrome used to have the same problem for a couple months until they released a new version a few weeks ago that, finally, fixed it.
I'm guessing the Brave folks should probably recompile a fresh version using the latest Chromium code that (hopefully) fixes the problem.