Brave freezes whole system with Hardware Acceleration enabled

[simurq]

I have searched and walked through the section for similar issues but I found them different from mine one way or another.
I've been experiencing this for several months now. I didn't care at first expecting that the issue would be rectified with the following releases.

Description

Occasionally, the whole system freezes when I try to launch the browser or open a new tab/page after launching it. Even a slight mouse move is enough to trigger the condition. Again, it happens occasionally, not always, but quite often, making me reset the system.

Initially, I had no idea (and am still unsure, frankly) that Brave was the cause of the problem or somehow related to it. That's why I've tried to solve the problem by seeking advice in various Reddit groups and directly from the OS developers. But after several months of research, albeit partially successful, and given the increasing frequency of incidents associated with Brave, I've decided to open an issue here.

Currently, I use Brave with hardware acceleration disabled, as suggested at one of the above groups. And it helps a lot. But it's not a solid solution, is it?

Steps to Reproduce

1. Launch Brave.
2. Or, try to open a new tab.
3. Or, try moving the mouse while the page is loading.

Actual result:

Complete system freeze with no keyboard and mouse feedback.

Reproduces how often:

Quite often.

Brave version (brave://version info)

Brave: 1.37.113 Chromium: 100.0.4896.88 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Revision: 4450653bfa91182e85723d8f1dee64dd6ce40ed4-refs/branch-heads/4896@{#1086}
OS: Pop!_OS 21.10 (Ubuntu spin-off), Linux kernel: 5.16.15

Other Additional Information:

Tried with Brave Shields and Rewards disabled, but since the issue happens occasionally, could not get a freeze when I tried.

Miscellaneous Information:

My hardware details taken with hw-probe and published on Linux Hardware.

[vincurekf]

I am having similar issue with brave completely freezing all its windows.
It happens randomly, most often when I hover mouse over some link, the mouse starts glitching and brave freezes.
I have to kill brave from terminal otherwise the whole OS is unusable without mouse.

OS:

DISTRIB_ID=ManjaroLinux
DISTRIB_RELEASE=21.2.5
DISTRIB_CODENAME=Qonos
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Manjaro Linux"

Brave:

brave-browser 1.37.111-1

[rebron]

cc: @iefremov

[ShiroYasha456]

I'm having the same issue on EndeavourOS. Switching to TTY2 sometimes worked and I was able to kill brave from there but most of the time it doesn't.

[paul-incountry]

I'm experiencing the same issue:

OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed
Kernel: 6.0.12
Brave: [Version 1.46.144 Chromium: 108.0.5359.128 (Official Build) unknown (64-bit)](https://brave.com/latest/)
Wayland

If I enable Hardware Acceleration, Brave freezes the whole system. If I disable it, everything is OK.

[marcoradocchia]

Can confirm same exact behavior on Archlinux (Wayland): 1.64.34 Chromium: 121.0.6167.85 (Official Build) nightly (64-bit). Disabling Hardware Acceleration fixes the issue.

[dcdeepesh]

Same issue. Same system & versions as previous comment.

For me it happened with brave, edge and vivaldi (all chromium based, so chromium issue maybe?) when uninstalling a PWA. On the PWA list screen (brave://apps etc.), the window starts twitching and resizing, closing the app from KDE task launcher eventually changes the cursor to the "move" cursor over the window. Happens randomly but is easily reproducible.

Switched to X11 and no issues since then.

Edit: It happens in X11 too. During adding/removing apps, during adding bookmarks, extensions, etc., basically anything that's part of the browser and not the website. Again, unpredictable and randomly.

[alcarraz]

For me, this is happening since I started using brave, I don't remember how long ago.

OS: Ubuntu 23.10.
WM: Gnome with wayland
Brave: Versión 1.64.122 Chromium: 123.0.6312.122 (Build oficial) (64 bits)

It is really annoying, I can't even use Google meet with background blur because the only workaround is to disable HW accel, and I have to switch to Chrome for that.