When I use Brave Browser, I sometimes encounter websites that do not react at all after load. Scrolling does not work, clicking on links does nothing, and you cannot even copy text.
The site appears crashed, but the rest of the browser works fine.
Here is one reason for the issue: Brave reacts to cookie and privacy prompts automatically. This works well most of the time, but sometimes, it does not.
Sites stop responding in those cases. You can reload them, but the issue persists. There is a solution though.
- Click on the Shield-icon in Brave’s address bar.
- Toggle the Shields functionality to Off. Brave reloads the webpage.
- You should get a privacy prompt now.
- Select Reject all or whichever option you want.
- Re-enable Shields. The site reloads.
The webpage works normally from that moment on. It is not locked anymore and you may interact with the site again.
I do not experience the behavior often. Maybe once every 250 or so sites I open and visit.
What about you? Did you notice the odd behavior? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
I thought it was a problem in all Chrome based browsers. I was doing those refreshes for a while. Sites do not scroll until you accept or reject cookies.
Interesting, I never experienced this in other browsers. Might need to give it a try when I encounter a site with the issue.
No, you misunderstood me. It’s a Brave bug as far as I know, but since I have not used other Chrome based browsers in quite a while, I assumed it was a bug in Chrome code. It was wrong for me to assume. This bug (no scrolling, scrolling bar disappearing or scrolling only by mouse’s middle button) is present on hundreds of websites from many countries but mostly in US and Europe. I guess it depends on which cookie scripts those websites are using. Did anyone have this issue if they didn’t use native Brave Shields and used usual Ad Blockers?
Understood 🙂 I think you won’t experience this with regular content blockers. My best bet is that Brave’s “extra” cookie prompt handling is to blame for this. You might experience this with extensions that handle prompts automatically as well, but I never used them for long.