My setting is for the vertical tab bar to expand on mouseover.
Now (after upgrading from 1.87.190 to 1.92.141), when I return to a Brave window after having used any other window (Brave or not), the vertical tab bar is very often – almost always – expanded, even when the mouse pointer is not at all in the vicinity of the left edge.
It doesn’t happen absolutely always, which makes it all the more puzzling; I can’t figure out what’s different between the times when it’s expanded and the times when it remains properly collapsed.
Here’s another quirk that may amount to a clue: When I return to a Brave window and the vertical tab bar is (unwarrantedly) in the expanded state, if I click on the tab bar button, instead of collapsing the tab bar, the only thing that happens is that the page content shifts to the left, as if the tab bar had just been collapsed. If I click the button again, the tab bar collapses properly.
In my initial post I mentioned “It doesn’t happen absolutely always” and “I can’t figure out what’s different between the times when it’s expanded and the times when it remains properly collapsed.” So… no, it didn’t appear to be consistent at all.
However…
After you asked me to make a video of it, I had to find a way to reproduce the symptom at will, and I found one. It involves restoring the window from minimized state, which is not what had been happening in the few days before I created this post. (Because I hardly ever minimize a Brave window.) So there are at least two possible triggers that lead to the same symptom.
So this video starts right after I’ve restored the window from minimized state.
Even though the trigger is different, the result is the same with regard to the vertical tab bar being expanded when it shouldn’t (because it was collapsed when the window was minimized) and with the abnormal effect of the tab bar’s toggle button.
In the video, at about the 5-second mark, I click on the tab bar’s toggle button (which only makes the page content shift to the right*) and at about 8.5 seconds I click on it again, which collapses the tab bar.
* In my previous comment, I had written that it made the page content shift to the left. I must have been mistaken as to what I had seen. Or else it would mean that the page content shifts to the left or right according to whether the program thought that the tab bar was being collapsed or expanded, even though neither is actually happening.
I have a suspicion that maybe related to the extensions/custom theme you have installed. In the video you shared, I see 7 extensions installed, a custom window theme, and four private window sessions running.
Can you try creating an additional profile (Menu > More tools > Guest window) with no extensions enabled in it and with no other windows open and try to reproduce the issue? Here is what I’m seeing on my end (not sure why the video quality is so poor and contrast so high – sorry about that):
I’ve been using the same theme and extensions for a great many years, except for one extension (Proton Pass) that I added on 17 June of this year. (I will remove it first if my tests with the virgin profile don’t pan out.) Also: I always use private windows for just about everything. Having four private windows and one regular window open at the same time is the normal state of things for me and has never caused any issues.
And yet the bug started manifesting itself only after updating Brave on 31 July, which is also when I enabled Brave Origin.
So it seems more plausible to me that some Brave setting is involved, even if it’s in the context of one or more of the extensions.
To be continued.
BTW: In the mean time (i.e. since this morning), I observed that there are periods when the bug expresses constantly and other periods when it goes dormant. In other words, it appears to be random. So it was probably a coincidence that “restoring from minimized” appeared to be a trigger.
This is happening to me as well. I’m on a Macbook (one monitor), and Brave is v 1.93.129. Just started happening within the last month.
The vertical tabs will randomly be expanded by default when I switch between windows. When I switch to another window after opening a new window that has this expanded behavior, all other windows expand the vertical tabs as well. I’m 100% sure it’s not due to me accidentally having the cursor in a weird spot, as it has been happening consistently for the past month or so, and I’ve paid mind to where my cursor is whenever it happens.
After collapsing each vertical tab bar by manually hovering over it and moving the cursor back out, it seems to stay collapsed for a while. But then it will repeat the same behavior within the next hour or so.
I have different extensions on all of my windows, but the only one I have on all of them is darkreader. And this behavior is persistent across all of my windows.
I’ve noticed an important pattern. The bug happens when I expand the collapsed vertical tabs (by hovering over them), and after I collapse them again by moving the mouse outside the tabs, all other windows will now be expanded (even after collapsing the tabs in the window in which I temporarily hovered over the tabs).
@dben89x: I had noticed that too (about the effect on all other Brave windows) but neglected to mention it. I was about to downgrade to an earlier version when I noticed that I don’t have to hover in/out to collapse the bar. It also collapses by de-focusing and re-focusing the window, which means that a simple pair of Alt+Tab (which I do thousands of times a day anyway) is enough to get rid of the tab bar.
@Mattches: Sorry for the delay. I am no longer receiving notifications by email from this forum. Also: the reply composition mechanism is now unusable on a desktop, so I had to switch to a mobile device to write this.
For the record: I think that these two more recent posts refer to something closely related - maybe even identical but worded differently - to what I had been trying to describe in the present post:
And yet another one, the next day:
So it appears that the issue is not limited to Linux or Brave Origin.