Privacy Concerns with Brave Browser on 8GB RAM Laptop - Seeking Advice

[tammygombez]

Hello, fellow forum members,

I wanted to start a discussion regarding my experience with the Brave browser, which has been a great tool for watching YouTube videos and accessing ad-free content on the web. However, I have some privacy concerns when using it on my 8GB RAM laptop, and I’m hoping to get some advice and insights from this community.

Let me begin by stating that Brave browser has been a game-changer for me in terms of enjoying online content without intrusive ads. Its built-in ad-blocking and privacy-focused features have provided a smoother browsing experience. However, as I use it on my 8GB RAM laptop, I’ve noticed some privacy-related issues that have raised concerns. While Brave browser’s emphasis on privacy is commendable, I’ve noticed that it tends to consume a significant amount of system resources, particularly RAM.
In my observations, Brave browser appears to have a higher number of background processes compared to other browsers. Although this may be related to its privacy features and the handling of ad-blocking, I’m concerned about the potential impact on my laptop’s performance and overall privacy.

Please note that I’m not looking to discourage the use of Brave browser, as I highly value its features and ad-free experience. Instead, I’m seeking guidance to optimize its performance on my 8GB RAM laptop[https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/d/8gb-ram-laptops/] and address the privacy concerns I’ve encountered.

Thank you all for your time and insights. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and recommendations!

[Emi]

The reason you see many process has to do with Security and Stability, Privacy has nothing to do with a program splitting its processes in million processes if it wants to.

A 5 seconds search in any search engine, would have explained you that in Chromium and Gecko and any modern technology Browser, the browsers don’t and won’t (by default, because they can but it probably will crash the browser) run the browser in a single process, each process equals to each tab opened, each extension installed, renderers, the Browser process itself, and utilities like audio service if you play a video, or network etc etc.
Also, each extension will spawn a new process if you enable them to run in Private window and you open a Private window.

Brave by default doesn’t even have many processes as other browsers like Opera, Brave only has 9 on a clean profile, and the only one that is like an extra one, that others will not have is the Extensions: Brave which is in charge of Web Discovery Project and the Element Picker for the adblocker.

So, the amount of process is based on whatever you have installed or the website you are browsing, because Chromium will also add more because of the whole site-isolation feature, which is done exactly for SECURITY reasons, for all the CPU vulnerabilities and all that, like spectre, so no, it has nothing to do with Privacy.

But yes, splitting process gives more security and stability, it has been used for years, you can even see the same behavior in Windows with the svchost, where Win10+ started to split the process in different processes by default, even if that consumes more memory and shows dozen more svchost processes, it is done because of stability.

Going back to Brave, you need to understand that not using Memory RAM and expecting a program to use 1% all the time. Not using memory RAM is wasting memory ram, you want to fill the memory as much as possible.
For example, Brave uses more memory than Edge, but that doesn’t make Edge better. One thing to note is that Brave has a native adblocker with thousands of rules added to it, and for some reason that consumes more RAM than uBlock, but… will 50MB matter? no, there is no memory leak, since the memory RAM is not increasing higher, to 90%+ when the disk might be used because RAM is not available, and if you don’t have a really fast SSD your computer will go slow mode.

Brave consumes LESS CPU than Edge, and while not enough, just like an average of 2-3% less, to be honest it is better to want less CPU usage than Memory RAM usage, because lower CPU usage is good, for temperature and all that, while memory RAM is whatever, especially in 2023 when you can buy memory pretty cheap for Desktop AND laptops.

Next time you can use Chromium internal Task Manager with Shift+ESC and see each process, what they are, and how much resources they consume. You probably used the OS task manager that doesn’t explain anything.