Brave browser crashes MacBook Air, other browsers come close

I have never installed those programs so can't provide specific guidance on removing all their remnants. However utilities like Find Any File can be used to fully search all folders on your Mac (including hidden and protected ones that Spotlight does not search) to find files associated with these programs.

You chose to selectively post only portions of the Etrecheck results, and Etrecheck wasn't given full access, so there's much more information but people like me cannot see it. It makes it hard to remotely figure out what is going on. We have no other information about your system to go on. Just partial information.

There are some simple things that are easy to try which may provide a clue:

• Quit Firefox. See if things improve. You probably have multiple tabs or windows open, one of them may be trying to do things, some sites play videos and whatnot in the background, and Firefox can use lots of resources.
• You can also quit all browsers and see if the machine quiets down. Then restore them one at a time to see which has the worst impact.
• Are you running one or more virtual machines or operating systems? I would shut those all down to see if it helps.
• You also have dropbox and iCloud drive activity, I would shut those down as well, to see if the "busy - ness" reduces some. Not sure if you can actually shut off iCloud activity as some of your files may be stored there, so take care with that suggestion. But it should not be updating continuously. What do you have going on in iCloud, do you have large photo libraries in iCloud, or something else like that, that might be trying to update?
• If you restart your computer and then activate no programs, is the computer immediately busy and slow? If it is, then it would be time to inspect your startup items or anything else that runs in the background. Which is why the full Etrecheck report is needed.
• Boot in safe mode. Is the computer "busy" then also? That could point towards a hardware issue, as someone else suggested. A hardware problem could also cause a computer that used to be fine to start running hot, etc.
• Can't tell how old your computer is, but if it's more than 5-6 years old, suspect a possible disk issue or other hardware issue. You could try a utility like DriveDX that will evaluate your SSD. If it's failing, lots of your symptoms would make sense.
• The computer getting very hot is something that needs to be addressed. That's not normal, and those thermal extremes will greatly accelerate wear and tear on the electronics inside (thermal cycles are often what cause computer hardware to wear out).
• Another experiment to try is to restart and log into a vanilla other user account that has nothing installed or active. That could tell you if the issues are user-specific, or if they are system-wide.

Both Brave and Firefox work well on all my Macs. No "anti-virus" junk has ever been inflicted upon them though, so try removing whatever you're using. You don't need them. Try removing your browser extensions too.

WindowServer is the process that draws everything on your Mac's screen. As such it is not very useful toward identifying a runaway process.

The back of my laptop gets so hot you can't touch it for more than a second.

That's not good. No Mac should ever get that hot. You probably ought to have it evaluated by Apple for a possibly hazardous fault.

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Aphelios1 wrote:

(I have Malwarebytes and Clam XAV)

You should never install two anti-virus products as they tend to interfere with one another. You really don't need any anti-virus software on a Mac. They usually cause more problems than they solve plus they impact system performance.

I used to have no problem working with multiple browser windows open, each with a bunch of tabs, multiple Word and Excel docs open, and Slack and my email. Now the CPU freaks out like it's going to explode almost for no reason most of the time. The back of my laptop gets so hot you can't touch it for more than a second.

Run EtreCheck and post the report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

Aphelios1 wrote:

The two things that appear to sometimes take up to 100% of CPU power are "RTprotection daemon" and "window server." I know the RT protection daemon is related to anti-virus software (I have Malwarebytes and Clam XAV), but what is window server?

RT protection daemon is part of Malwarebytes. First thing to try is to turn off Malwarebytes' real-time protection option in its settings. This feature has been known to sometimes take up large amounts of cpu resources for certain users. See if the issue goes away. Next, as others have suggested, uninstall the other anti-virus protection you have installed. See if the issue goes away. And if the issue persists, completely uninstall Malwarebytes to see if that helps. I'm suggesting you do one thing at a time here to try to isolate the cause.

Did you give Etrecheck full disk access? It does not look like a complete report was posted.

You have multiple VPN programs loaded.

Also, CLAMAV is still apparently present on the computer.

Can you look at Activity Monitor and see what that other process is?

Aphelios1 wrote:

I'm not comfortable giving EtreCheck full disk access, and I'm definitely not posting all that information here on a public forum. I've decided that I'm going to have to call Apple support and spend whatever time necessary getting to the bottom of things.

That is your choice, but EtreCheck sanitizes the personal information. You can easily revoke "Full Disk Access" after running EtreCheck. Good luck with Apple as they will most likely have you restore from a backup or worst case perform a clean install of macOS and manually migrate your data while manually reinstalling & configuring all your third party apps. You may need to do this anyway depending how much time you want to spend troubleshooting the issue.

Things seem to have gotten better since eliminating Clam and stopping Malware Bytes RT protection, but there's still some phantom runaway process that comes and goes out of nowhere.

Part of what has made this so difficult is that there's no rhyme or reason to the whole thing. I'll be working for an hour or two with a bunch of browser activity, emails, Google cloud things, Slack, Word/Excel, etc., and everything runs fine. The mac is cool and mostly silent like it should be. But then, all of the sudden and for no apparent reason, the thing goes into hyper-drive mode, even though nothing has changed. Sometimes I stop everything and stare at activity monitor for a minute, and things will slow down, but then I'm not doing anything so what's the point. What also doesn't make sense is that sometimes even with 91% idle CPU according to activity monitor, hyper-drive mode still happens for no reason.

At this moment, everything is fine and Activity Monitor says 75% - 85% of CPU is idle. I have Word, Excel, Firefox, and Activity Monitor open and the Mac is silent, although it does still feel a little warmer than it should, so the temperature problem might be an additional thing by itself, only made worse by this hyper-drive phantom process.

I've been battling some of our organization's Macs which have been having extremely intermittent system freezes and performance issues. These issues are extremely difficult to troubleshoot since the macOS system logs unfortunately are basically worthless these days for troubleshooting purposes. It took me two weeks of testing a clean install of macOS before I could reproduce the failure to confirm the Logic Board is most likely defective.

Make sure to run Disk Utility First Aid on the drive. Even if First Aid shows everything as "Ok" click on the "Details" to see if there are any unfixed errors. If there are any unfixed errors, then you will need to backup or clone the drive followed by erasing the whole physical drive before restoring from the backup or clone. I suggest running First Aid on the Container (you may need to click on "View" within Disk Utility and selecting "Show All Devices" for the Container to appear).

Good luck in your efforts.

Aphelios1 wrote:

Now, for some reason (and this may have been happening for some time but I didn't notice), when my battery reaches 27%, the computer dies as if the battery was at 4%. I never get the notification that it needs to be plugged in, no warning at all, just a blank screen out of nowhere.

Usually that indicates a battery failure. What is the condition of the battery? If it is "Service Recommended" or "Service Battery", then it means an internal fault has been found with the battery. If the battery condition is "Normal", then run the Apple Diagnostics again to see if the battery still passes.

And what's weirder than anything else is this – upon booting up from this random premature battery burn out, the computer thinks the date is December 31st, 2019. ***??

When a Mac loses all power the Date & Time will reset to some default value.

I only know this because web pages won't accept traffic from a device with the wrong date, so they reject my connection attempt. And THEN, when I go to fix the date, before I can touch anything the computer just fixes itself, as if it anticipated that move but couldn't do something until I opened Time & Date Preferences. Has anyone ever heard of this before?

Usually when the date & time are way out of sync macOS won't auto-correct it using a network time server or it takes macOS a lot longer to correct the time. It seems the act of entering the System Preferences will sometimes trigger the update, but many times I have to toggle the setting on & off.

I'm starting to think this really could be hardware related, and that a clean install of Mac OS might be the only option, or at least the best option considering it would probably be more efficient than trying all of these one-off troubleshooting things.

If you have a spare external drive you can try installing macOS to the external drive and booting the laptop to see how it performs. While it may run a bit slower you may gain valuable information without having to resort to all the work involved with a clean install and later restore from backup. If a clean install on an external drive works, then it either indicates a software issue or an issue with the internal drive.