Please add a toggle to disable the pull-down-refresh.
Reason: It is annoying, pages keeps refreshing whenever I swipe down
More than just annoying. I just lost a large post to Reddit because the page reloaded.
7 Likes
YES PLEASE It is way beyond annoying. At least an option to turn it off.
4 Likes
Been a while since I used Android. Are you sure thereās no setting for that anywhere? Iām wanting to say I had it disabled long ago on my Samsung Galaxy S9.
In any case, I do know itās an option on iPhone, as you can see in the screenshot below. So if itās not on Android, might be something to come here for the future
2 Likes
Yes! Upvoted. It happened to me too many many times, cumulatively lost literally hours of work. Iām just thinking a better solution would be a delay. Like you have to already be at the top of the page for a second or half for refresh on next pull-down. Better yet, have a Refresh on Pull-down Behaviour setting as a select input with the options being Disabled, Delayed, Single pull-down, Double pull-down.
@Saoiray no setting on Android
5 Likes
I lose at least one long post a week in Brave and itās probably pushing me to go back to Chrome where I have an add-on (Formalizer?) that keeps what I type in any edit window. In brave I only navigate away and when I come back the text often disappears in from of my eyes and I donāt know if a way to either get it back or find it in summer cached file: Whatās the solution? I donāt want to go to a separate editor to your every response on a forum - that seems to be the only option other than using chrome. Itās bloody annoying.
4 Likes
This just happened to me - lost 30 mins of work, then came here and found all the other people who already been flagging this as a problem with Brave for over a year at least now! What on earth is going on? How can something so glaringly obviously bad, not have been fixed yet? Itās rage-inducing. I was actually thinking Brave might be the browser that could finally convert me away from Firefox. I love it, features, privacy, performance, everything. Then this happens and I find itās causing misery for so many others, and is well-documented, and now despite how much I like Brave and would probably use most of its services tbh, given time, I will actually fully uninstall it across Android, Windows and Linux, and stay on FF, if this one issue is not fixed. Because suddenly I feel like Iām losing faith. This is basic good UX. Itās not a complicated argument. Itās not hard to understand the problem. And if you have ever lost anything data-wise (which is most people, incl. Brave devs, Iād imagine) and you have empathy, you would see these reports and hopefully empathy would kick in, youād recall the last time you lost something because of an unintentional page refresh, and the recollection of what that moment felt like should, ideally, cause you to feel your usersā pain, and resolve to help them immediately. Unless something is lacking. Iād hope itās neither empathy nor respect for its users because these seem to be things that are kinda baked into the Brave identity, ostensibly. Yet here we are - all these annoyed users, all these community reports and threads elsewhere (all over Reddit too) with, say, a year or so gone by on a lot of them, and look - itās still happening to bright-eyed optimistic potential Firefox converts (and you know weāre the most difficult bunch of browser users to shift because of how conscientious we broadly tend to be about choosing, deliberately, the browser we use, based on something kinda intentful and vaguely moral). If Brave is already appealing to privacy- and security-conscious users like me, and tempting us away from FF (which no browser has ever managed to do, personally) then they have a lot to feel positive aboutā¦ IF they decide not to squander that trust and good faith by not addressing comprehensible, long-standing, inexpensively- and easily-fixed, high-user-friction pain points. Thinking about the other browsers Iāve used, I donāt think āpull down to refreshā is in some of them, but even where it is, I donāt recall its being mandatory? And where it is present, itās not always on by default. So Brave seems to have not only turned on by default and made mandatory a minor feature that most browser companies have either chosen not to implement, or if they have, havenāt turned on by default, and certainly havenāt made āalways onā). Brave has ALSO then sat back and seemingly justā¦ ignored the plethora of unhappy Android users all over the web with stories of woe explaining how itās caused them to lose work, or had a personal or creative cost, and ignored the explanations of why itās problematic, and ignored the well-known principle of it being good business sense to fix things which are low cost in terms of dev time while also high-cost in terms of user pain/friction. Those are the low-hanging fruit - low cost fixes which resolve big user pain points, so result in high positive sentiment and user loyalty for minimal dev time/money invested. They are quick wins. Sensible companies know this strategy. And conversely, when brands donāt enact the quick fixes, the more time passes without them being addressed, the more additional friction, frustration and confusion accumulates in the user base on top of the inital issue. Users start to wonder if the brand actually just doesnāt care about their issue. And that is a bigger problem. Apathy and disillusionment set in, and you start losing your user base, and ironically, because you didnāt strategically remedy something in the short term, which would have cost you very little, and would have carried long-term benefits for the business. I would love to see it fixed. Iām going to stick around a few days/weeks and keep my fingers crossed, and if thereās still nothing but inertia and stony silence, I will wave a sad farewell to this Brave new world.
3 Likes
Sure, adding a toggle to disable the pull-down refresh feature would be a great way to improve user experience, especially for those who find it disruptive. This would allow users to choose whether they want the refresh option enabled or not.
2 Likes
Same thing. Iāve just installed Brave because Iām afraid of Mozillaās shady changes (promotion of AI, privacy, statements against free speech). Brave already looks better despite of being a for-profit company.
I really liked many features of Brave: YouTube works in background, no ads, no GDPR banners, no āswitch to mobile appā banners.
But this pull-down refresh is so annoying that I canāt consider the browser usable. Despite of all itās wonderful features.
I do not know, if the following works; but the screenshot above, is also in a comment at:
How to prevent pull-down-to-refresh of mobile browser
https://dev.to/khaled17/how-to-prevent-pull-down-to-refresh-of-mobile-browser-mjp
Why is there no parity between iOS and Android version of the app for this toggle? I can confirm the toggle to disable this is available in iOS version of Brave but does not exist in Android. We have a touchscreen application that is running on Brave on Android that supports a ton of user gestures, and it is a showstopper for us to have the browser refresh the app on a swipe down.
We have a feature request for this open on our Github:
1 Like
Thanks @Mattches ā I guess open PRs on that repo are not visible to the public as I see no open PRs there, but if I could upvote it I would. Because it has been open since October, Iām guessing there is no rush to get this one over the line and released, but I just want to say if you search community forum there are a ton of asks for this one, and it is a showstopper for us atm.
Two years later and they havenāt added it on Android.
Why, is that even a request?
Itās already on Macintosh telephones.
Like what, request what they already do, and know should be added?
The simple answer would be that Brave for iOS and Brave for Android are created in very different ways. Currently thereās no one-size-fits-all solution in developing these two apps on very different Operating Systems and also different ranges of difficulty for different things to work on. I understand your frustration, āif they canāt have it, why canāt weāā¦ but please understand itās not always that easy and in the grand scheme of things I guess itās not a top priority and/or a higher difficulty thing to work on for the developers currently, though clearly it is on the list as Mattches pointed out in his link, above, here: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/41730
and if you go to that link, you can see the most recent update (quoted below), unfortunately it is a few months old, but it is recognized and will be worked on in accordance of their priority (though from the looks of it, it is also high difficulty thing to get setup currently too).
I donāt mean to be rude, I am just a user, and I think what Iāve shared makes sense. (and again I understand itās frustrating, having patience for technological things can be frustrating, I know this personally (why donāt you work, smack smack smack goes the monitor) but hopefully they can get it done for you soon! 
)
This feature exists on the iOS build of Brave ā we desperately need parity on Android. We deploy a touch screen app on Android. Weāre using an older build currently, because this pull-down to refresh would destroy the usability of our app ā which involves a ton of user gestures on the touch screen.
Iāve just pinged the team about this and Iāve had the team take another look. The issue will be triaged out to a dev for review and implementation. I cannot say when exactly it will be implemented, but there is some forward progress here.
1 Like
Can anyone identify what release of Brave introduced the refresh on pull-down gesture? We are running this release in the field, and I can confirm for sure it does not have the problem:
Weāve been running it for more than a year, and we handle all kinds of touchscreen gestures for our application. Iām curious when it was introduced because then I know I can update the browser only to that version. We manage the Brave deployment on our application through a private app store we have control over.
disabling pull-down-refresh isnāt enough. there should be an option on the settings to disable all gestures on the page. trying to pinch zoom unintendedly refreshes the page.