Brave is no longer opening to my Group Speed Dial home page when opening a new private window.
It has worked this way for literally years, and suddenly it no longer works. I assumed that the extension developer decided to become greedy and gate that feature behind a paywall, but I cannot find any mention of that in their documentation.
I routinely need to access sites and services for work that involve different clients, Group Speed Dial holds all the shortcuts I use on a daily basis making my job much more streamlined.
Since I’m still able to navigate to the Group Speed Dial manually, I don’t see how this could be anything other than a bug.
How can I either revert this change, work around it, or is this bug known and will be fixed?
Umm, pretty sure you never have been able to on Brave. You might be thinking of another browser used or something. But you can even see where this has been something people have requested from as far back as 2019:
And someone in 2022 hoping a flag they saw would allow for change, but it wasn’t.
This needs to be reverted, it’s a breaking change for my workflow. I was able to customize the new tab page in private browsing before, I am no longer able to.
Please inform me how to either revert back to the previous version and disable all updates, or provide me with a workaround to re-enable this feature.
My sole alternative is to cease use of Brave for me and all organizations that I manage.
@SirRendleGore please keep things polite. I shared how I don’t recall it being available, showed links to people who have requested this functionality which also is an example to show it didn’t exist.
Nobody is saying you are lying or anything. I know I was spending time trying to look for this to see when it might have been an option. This is how I saw the links for 2019 and 2022 that I shared.
I’m still trying to find any example from Desktop that has anyone sharing it. If you can help find examples and versions, it would be appreciated.
@MasterLink do you recall Brave having speed dial on dashboard (homepage) in Private/Incognito on desktop?
The closest to an older build that I have is a VM last fired up on 1/7/2026, so I checked there (with the VM’s net adapter disconnected to it can’t update). (Brave version 1.85.120)
I cannot at least on that build, see any speed dial on a Private Window:
Since we have “offline installers” available on GitHub, if OP is willing to provide a version number where they know they saw speed dial, we can install that offline version (with the net adapter still disabled so it doesn’t auto-update itself) and then re-verify.
But with that said, I swear I’ve never seen a speed dial in a Private Window, because it’s “private” therefore it wouldn’t be private if it had a speed dial (since it’s using its own NTP specifically for private browsing, which doesn’t even show you time, news, or stats, not even settings since it wouldn’t be persistent anyway).
(EDIT: I checked through flags on the 1.85.xxx build and found nothing as well that might potentially allow this.)
@SirRendleGore I believe that certain custom NTP/speed dial extensions would work in Private browsing but most wouldn’t. That said, it looks like this is not a Brave issue, but a Chromium (the engine Brave is built on top of) issue. It appears that the ability for NTP extensions to override and work in Private sessions was recently removed.
Chromium issues for this can be viewed here:
As such, we’ll likely need to wait and see whether or not the Chromium team is going to revert this change to allow NTP extensions Private sessions – if they do then Brave will also receive this fix (for “free”). It not, then we would have to make our own implementation of this, which may or may not be feasible given dev bandwidth (remember, any deviation we make from the base Chromium engine requires us to manually maintain that change, requiring additional time and effort from our devs for each browser update/Chromium bump).
Yeah, original started elsewhere and them mentioning extension got missed by me or would have focused more there. Originally started with part below and then I merged things over this way.
That’s when regressions happen, something I think most forks would at least try and avoid.
Not just you, I missed it as well, completely 100%. The way they responded however did not make me feel it was about an extension any longer which I think contributed to both of us entirely missing that part, they never once brought it up again.
