Tabs become disorganized all the time

Brave Browser
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1

Description of the issue:

Almost every time I start the browser, the tabs are messed up in some new way.
The history gets mixed up between tabs.
Some tabs are moved far back into the history of another tab.
Sometimes all my tab groups and pinned tabs are un-grouped and un-pinned.

I don’t even know if that’s all, or if some tabs have been removed completely..
But I have definitely lost some tabs indirectly because of this chaos.

This is extremely frustrating and makes the browser almost unusable.
The whole point of storing tabs is to store them properly and actually get back to them.
Now it just feels like I’m playing a slot machine with the tabs.

Steps to Reproduce (add as many as necessary): 1. 2. 3.

This happens basically every time that I start the browser.

Perhaps there is some relation to how many tabs are open?
I currently have ~70 tabs, and the problem seems “smaller” now compared to when I have had like ~150 tabs.
By “smaller” I mean that the tab placement and history is shifted around to a smaller amount, like the number of steps that things have moved is smaller.
And I don’t think I have ever seen this problem happen when I have ~20 tabs.

Actual Result (gifs and screenshots are welcome!):

Utter chaos in the tabs.

Expected result:

Not utter chaos in the tabs.

Reproduces how often:

Every single day, every time that I start the browser.

Operating System and Brave Version(See the About Brave page in the main menu):

Windows 11 Pro
24H2
26100.3476

Brave 1.82.170 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Chromium: 140.0.7339.186

Additional Information:

I use vertical tabs on the left hand side.

I have tested with extensions disabled, and the problem still happens.

2

@RetroEncabulator,
So can you reproduce this issue consistently? For example, if you were to close the browser right now, then reopen it, would your tabs become mixed/scrambled as you describe above? Or does it only happen a certain length of time? Or only after rebooting your PC? Trying to determine exactly when the “reordering” occurs so we can deduce what causes it.

3

@Mattches Thanks for your reply!

It happens a lot, like every day, but not necessarily every single time that I open the browser.

After writing this post, I closed Brave and when I opened it again, I had similar problems again. This time, a bunch of tabs were moved into a different tab group, but the history appears unchanged this time, and all groups and pinned tabs were still there this time.

Don’t think there was any software update in this case, as the browser version is still the same. There were no other software updates, and the computer was not restarted. All I did was re-organize my tabs into groups, and try to recover any lost links by thoroughly going through the history of each tab, only to have it all be scrambled again.

Other times, all the tab groups are gone, or the tab history is all mixed up, or tabs are out of order, or a mix of these problems at the same time.

I cannot see any pattern in when it happens or why only some part of the problem happens sometimes, except for what I mentioned about maybe seeing some relation to the number of tabs. Other than that, it appears totally random to me. Just for context: I am a middle aged software developer and have been doing computer stuff for over 30 years.

I have been using Brave for quite some time now, maybe a couple of years, and I wasn’t having this problem before, but recently it has been happening every day.

After searching around in this forum, it seems like this has been a recurring problem for many users over a long period of time, so I’m not gonna hold my breath.

4

Tabs being lost is something that is/has been reported before – but this specific issue where tabs are there but are disorganized/moved around/etc. is not something I’ve seen frequently, if at all. I have no idea why this would be happening.

While I ask around about this, can you please try creating a new browser profile (makes sure you close your original profile window after doing so), open some tabs, create some groups – essentially make it look reasonably similar to the kind of tabs and groups you’d have in your normal browser profile. Then try closing and relaunching the browser a few times and see if you can get the issue to occur in the new profile.