Brave browser suddenly won’t open
It was literally open an hour ago, my tabs saved, closed it because I had to relocate and I reopened my laptop and can’t open the browser at all. I tried to restart the laptop, I tried to reinstall Brave. Brave beta works, so it may be version specific. before the bug I didn’t manually update neither windows nor Brave
Brave Version (check About Brave): can’t check, browser signals back as not responsive
Operating System: Windows 11
@biotryo is this still an active issue for you?
it is indeed still an active issue on my part. The solutions I’ve tried from previous posts have not worked
Can you try opening a guest profile from terminal?
start brave.exe --guest
I can! it does however open a private window, so I probably won’t be able to save much stuff
Did you have any extensions installed on your original profile?
It could be related to an installed extension. You can delete installed extensions directly from your User Data folder and then try relaunching Brave.
MacOS: /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/[profile_folder_name]/Extensions
Windows OS: C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\[profile_folder_name]/Extensions
The actual Profile folder names for [profile_folder_name] would be:
Default
Profile 1
Profile 2
Interesting outcome. I searched the folders as per instructions, and managed to find the Default profile, where I deleted the extensions. Now I can open the browser for long enough to select a profile, and the only profile available is “Profile 1”, but once I try to select it and open the actual internet browser, I get the same old “no response end process” message. Noteworthy is that I also tried to reinstall Brave and restart my laptop now that this new bit seems to be working, but to no success. There are also no files for “Profile 1” as far as I can tell in that local folder of Brave
Tried removing all my extensions and I’m still experiencing the same thing. I have a lot stuff for work I really can’t afford to lose on my Brave profile. Not to mention the tabs I had open in my last session that I can’t even bookmark and export, same with passwords since it won’t even launch properly. I’ve tried launching it with —no-experiments and –disable-gpu in the target on the exe as well and no luck with running as admin either. Was working just fine last night. now It’s a grey window with the window bar that’s white that says New Tab - Brave and still won’t load up beyond that. Clicking the window asks if I want to wait for the process to load or end task.
Update I ran “start brave.exe –disable-gpu” from command line and it loaded up Brave Nightly instead.
update 2 tried running –guest and it only opened a private mode window, so that is of no help. Now I too get the “welcome to brave profiles” window and clicking on my profile sets me back to brave freezing.
update 3 Made a backup of my profile and then deleted it. Brave now launches. it’s version 1.86.139. Time to see if putting my profile back in fixes it like it did the last time I had a major issue.
update 4 This sounds dumb, but copying your default and pasting that somewhere just to delete the default folder in Brave worked. Launched Brave without my default folder and it loaded up. So I closed it out and then pasted the default folder into user data and hit replace all for any existing files that were created and I can now access my bookmarks and passwords. I cannot however restore my last session and tabs. I try to paste them into my sessions folder the gray window and Brave not responding starts again. Anyone have an idea on restoring a previous session from backup?
update 5 I removed my copies of my old session and tabs. Launched brave again for a new session file to generate. Then I closed it. I opened the new session file in notepad++ and I opened my copy in notepad ++, right click and hit select all and then copy, then I went into the new session right clicked select all and pasted over it. Hit save and I put my tabs file and session file back into it just in case(probably only needed tabs but why not be extra careful/redundant?) Launched Brave again and right clicked on the tabs bar and clicked on restore closed window. It pulled up every tab and group I had. It will absolutely ravage your memory but it was long enough to bookmark all of my tabs.
I’m experiencing the same issue. At some point, when I try to open the Brave browser, it suddenly stops responding and won’t load. So I have no choice but to force quit it.
Brave is up to date
Brave 1.86.139 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Chromium: 144.0.7559.59
I tried a few things based on some references:
C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\brave.exe --profile-directory="Default" --incognito
Other additional options don’t matter. It only opens in incognito mode.
--no-experiments --disable-extensions --disable-gpu
In incognito mode, if I go into “Settings,” a new tab (settings page) opens in the original profile and the browser works normally.
If I close the browser while on screens like “Settings,” “New Tab,” or “OneTab (Chrome extension),” then reopen it, the browser launches normally.
If I close the browser while on an internet webpage like “Google,” then try to reopen it, the browser won’t launch and I have to force quit.
brave://crashes/ shows that there are no recent crash reports.
The result of running the code doesn’t show anything unusual.
C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\brave.exe --profile-directory="Default" --incognito --no-experiments --disable-extensions --disable-gpu --enable-leak-detection --crash-on-failure 2> %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\brave_console_out.txt
$ brave_console_out.txt
[4104:14064:0117/115909.890:ERROR:chrome\browser\profiles\profile_attributes_storage.cc:1032] Failed to PNG encode the image.
[4104:14064:0117/115910.312:ERROR:chrome\browser\ui\views\user_education\impl\browser_user_education_interface_impl.cc:154] Attempting to show IPH IPH_DiscardRing before browser initialization complete; IPH will not be shown.
$ %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Local State
"avatar_icon": "chrome://theme/IDR_PROFILE_AVATAR_26",
Reference:
I deleted the session and tab information as you suggested, and it opened normally. When I restored the session again, the browser did not open normally just like before.
cd %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\
cd [profile_folder_name]\Sessions\
@Zydrate ,
Did the browser continue to open normally after restoring the tabs and session, or did it only open properly again when you closed it on a specific page like below?
When I modified a new session file by replacing the contents of the session I was trying to restore it worked normally. However closing a tab(any tab: settings, bookmarks, new page, google, etc) would freeze the browser for me. I did have my tabs set to vertical mode which apparently can cause the browser to crash when closing a tab using the mouse and not a hotkey(ctrl+w). I toggled off vertical tabs and haven’t had an issue since. I also pruned down the 249 tabs I had open after bookmarking them. I didn’t experience the issue you noted with it closing normally on specific things but crashing on web pages. That would be another interesting thing to try to troubleshoot if I could recreate it.
edit I think I only put a copy of my tabs file with the session file I modified with the contents of my old session. I also made sure only those files were in the session folder in the brave installation. It was incredibly slow to launch given all the tabs I had in groups and took up 18gigs of memory. I had to wait for a while for the memory usage to drop. Didn’t have any other issue aside from the stated bug with having vertical tabs enabled causing Brave to crash if I tried to close any tab. I had the vertical tab bug in Brave Nightly as well.
I think I have a similar issue to yours, since I can now make a new separate profile, but not try to open or even edit my usual profile. You remarking on the fact that readding your tabs by force leads to your RAM usage go high until you bookmarked everything makes me think there might be a memory leak bug that caused this maybe? I can try to salvage what I can from the tabs I lost and I will try to use your methods listed here but so far I can only open a new profile. Will stick to horizontal tabs as well since I didn’t know that could cause crashes either
Yep, deleting my profile and readding the copy of the profile worked. I can recover all the tabs from history. Thanks for all the help
In my case, “vertical taps off” seems to be the solution among your solutions. After switching to the horizontal tabs and then back to the vertical tabs, the browser still opens normally. Thank you.