Brave won't open, January 2026

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:

  1. When I run the following code, Brave now launchs, but with the incongnito mode:
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
  1. In incognito mode, if I go into “Settings,” a new tab (settings page) opens in the original profile and the browser works normally.

    1. If I close the browser while on screens like “Settings,” “New Tab,” or “OneTab (Chrome extension),” then reopen it, the browser launches normally.

    2. 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.

  2. brave://crashes/ shows that there are no recent crash reports.

  3. 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.
  1. Editing the following file didn’t resolve the issue:
$ %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Local State

"avatar_icon": "chrome://theme/IDR_PROFILE_AVATAR_26",

Reference: