Cannot stop Brave from closing a PWA app / all tabs upon closing the window in Mac

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1

Hello, dear community. I have following two problems which I am unable to find solution for on the internet:

  1. Every time I click on the red X button of the Brave browser window in MacOS, all my tabs close, even though I have set the startup behavior of Brave browser to “continue where I have left” turned on. Upon opening the Browser window again, I have no tabs retained.

  2. I am saving many of my visited pages, such as Messenger, Google Photos, or Google Maps, as PWA apps (meaning they appear on my dock as an app). I’d like to keep them open. But upon closing them with the red X button, these apps completely turn off/quit.

I am therefore forced to use command + H shortcut to just “hide” the browser window or Brave’s installed apps instead of closing them

2

The reason this is occurring is because you’re closing the individual window of the browser – including the tabs in it – rather than quitting the browser process itself. This is true for any app/browser on macOS and this can definitely be misleading.

So instead of closing via the x at the top of the screen, try quitting the browser, either by right-clicking the dock icon and selecting Quit or using Cmd + Q. Now when you relaunch the browser, it will reopen with the tabs you last had.

Unfortunately I’m not sure what you are asking for here. If you want the app/site open then just leave it open (or minimize/hide them as you’re doing now). Since these apps are self-contained windows without their own tabs, there isn’t really an in-between here.

3

Thank you Mattches. I understand what you mean by closing individual windows. It is definitely misleading - seeing this behavior being a recently converted Windows to Mac user.

Regarding the quitting of the apps - I was referring to the same behavior as Safari displays. When you install a page as app (add to dock) - this app does not close upon pressing X button, but stays open (since it was not quit). Is it not possible to “keep apps running” in the background somehow?

Realistic use case would be to receive notifications from pages such as Facebook’s Messenger, without having to rely on command+H to hide a window.

4

Try the following:

  1. Go to brave://apps in the browser
  2. Find the relevant app (you mentioned Facebook) and right-click it
  3. Click App settings
  4. Toggle Notifications “on”
  5. Click More settings and permissions
  6. Scroll down to Background sync and set this permission to Allow

Now check and see if the app(s) work as expected.

5

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