@jasonv let me touch on a few things. This is going to be a much longer reply than I’d like, but will try to be a bit informative. Perhaps will break it up into multiple replies…
Brave is a small company. While there are some who handle everything “behind the scenes” for issues where support tickets can be made, the overwhelming majority of things are handled by just three people from Brave. These are Mattches, Steeven, and Evan123.
There are over 1500 posts made each week of people with various degrees of bug reports, questions, requests, etc. In order to increase the chances of people getting help, they have made Brave Community so users can help one another in addition to people from Brave. Many times, answers to issues people have have already been given but people don’t take the time to read through existing topics first.
No, they don’t. Sometimes they don’t get seen, in some other occasions they get ignored because they didn’t provide necessary information requested in templates, etc. But ones that can provide a lot of details and make sure to return to “bump” their post have a pretty high chance of getting responses.
They also are difficult to get in touch with. Like if you ever try to contact Google over issues you have, you’ll find that there’s a long list of unresolved topics. The same is true for Firefox, Chromium, etc. There are millions of users and most issues are not with the product itself but are based on things people have added. Such as the majority of issues people experience with Brave are due to extensions they have running or some custom settings they have changed.
Using Brave’s task manager as had been explained by User.1.000.000.000 can help to show what tasks are using your memory. Chromium based browsers use separate processes for everything in your browser. So your graphics renderer, Brave Rewards, auto update, crash report manager, audio service, data decoder, etc are all separate and count as what you thought meant to be “tabs” but instead just is running processes.
Let me quote something for you:
Using RAM is good. RAM (Random Access Memory) is designed to be a temporary storage for active processes, making your system run faster by holding data that the CPU might need in the near future. If RAM isn’t being used, it means your system isn’t fully utilizing its potential to speed up tasks.
Modern operating systems, like Windows, macOS, and Linux, try to maximize the use of available RAM by keeping commonly used data or programs loaded, even if you’re not actively using them, so they can be accessed quickly. This is why you often see a high percentage of RAM in use even when you’re not running many applications—it’s being used to cache files or preload programs for better performance.
So, while having some free RAM is important for ensuring there’s space for new tasks, unused RAM that sits idle when it could be speeding up your system is considered wasteful.
Seeing high RAM usage is not necessarily a bad thing unless it gets to or exceeds limits. Your screenshot of just 58% total usage with everything you have does not seem bad. Generally what will happen is Brave or your device will kill any process that isn’t needed to free up RAM as it’s needed.