How do I get Bitdefender Free to play nice with Brave browser?

bdfuser

Since installing Bitdefender Free, my Brave browser crashes (disappears) after a minute or so. No such problem with Firefox. Windows 10 desktop. Never experienced this problem with Kaspersky Free. Problem persists even after reinstalling Bitdefender Free.

Nunzio77

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling Brave after installing Bitdefender Free?

bdfuser

yes—unfortunately after uninstalling and reinstalling Brave, after uninstalling and reinstalling Bitdefender Free, Brave maintains its consistent behavior of crashing after a minute or 2

Nunzio77

Hi,
maybe maybe @Alexandru_BD or @camarie could help you.

camarie

I am not aware of this, but let me email the AVFree guys. Maybe it is a known issue.

camarie

There is a known issue, but not quite the same as described. In order to diagnose this the team would need logs to be captured so they can confirm (or not) it is a known thing.
I'm not sure how and if it is possible to open a support ticket for AV Free; at least they might direct you on what to do to generate these logs and where to upload these.

Alexandru_BD

Hi,

Yes, the Support teams will be able to assist here, regardless if you are using the free version. @bdfuser you can get in touch with the Bitdefender engineers by choosing one of the contact channels listed here:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/help/

State your contact reason / choose request category, then choose from the available contact channels, chat, phone and email/ticket. Chat would be the fastest way to reach them.

Regards,

Alex

bdfuser

Thanks, Bitdefender community & support, for your good faith efforts to help with the free version! Because my sleuthing had documented numerous Bitdefender-Brave crashing problems similar to mine in past years, I had hoped your better familiarity would lead to a faster remedy. My daily driver is Firefox for many reasons, but when I need a Chromium-compatible browser, I trust Brave the most.

Given Nunzio77's hinted expectation that uninstalling/reinstalling Brave would work, I decided to try again, this time exporting passwords and bookmarks and saving user data (a painful challenge before every session crashed), then uninstalled/reinstalled, copied old user data over the new user data and imported passwords and bookmarks. It worked. Except I had to manually/blindly (re)load extensions (which mostly, but not always succeeded). Basically, I've retrieved a pretty good copy of all my Brave work I accumulated in past years, though I wish I could access long-term history. So, wish I could have done better, but not bad. My priority was replacing Kaspersky with Bitdefender, that my research evaluated as the most reliable and light free option. And evidently, the culprit was a Brave installation gone bad, not Bitdefender. However, I must say my Brave installation had always worked great until Kaspersky (without warning or choice) changed their users to UltraAV. Unfortunately, I have no way to determine whether my Brave started crashing immediately after I was switched to UltraAV or after I installed Bitdefender. I just knew I was uncomfortable with UltraAV and Bitdefender was a far better choice.

I guess my one comment is that Brave support, after all these years, should offer an easily accessible, 100% reliable, user-friendly tool to 100% back-up and restore any Brave installation. There is no excuse for the poorly documented burdensome process imposed on users who want to restore more than just passwords and bookmarks. But that's on them, not Bitdefender. This thread of your community & support makes me an even stronger believer in Bitdefender.

maxfer3

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/344166#Comment_344166

It sounds like you did a lot of work to get Brave back up and running, but it's great that you were able to recover most of the data and get everything working again. I totally agree — Brave (and other browsers) should offer a simple and reliable way to fully back up and restore all your data, not just passwords and bookmarks. It really makes life easier for users, especially when it comes to saving long-term work.

By the way, when it comes to security and saving data when working with multiple browsers or accounts, I use masqad.com. This tool helps protect your online activity and provides additional security, so I can safely recommend it if you want to secure your browsing.

And of course, it's good that you chose Bitdefender — sometimes changing your antivirus can really solve performance issues. I hope your system will work without any problems now!

bdfuser

Thanks for the masq recommendation. I plan to study it further when I have a bit more time.

camarie

Is this legit? Downloaded the executable and it is not even signed. Hard to trust an executable without being signed, I'd say.

Nunzio77

Hi @bdfuser ,
I'm glad my suggestion to uninstall and reinstall Brave solved the problem. In my opinion there was something corrupted in Brave, which was solved like this.
Anyway, I'm curious to know your experience with Bitdefender Free, how you are finding it, how your PC is working with BD Free and any opinions and requests for improvements.

Welcome to the Community. 😊

Alexandru_BD

@bdfuser thank you for joining the community, for your kind words and for choosing Bitdefender!

Enjoy it! 👍️