This is a common occurrence with my Brave Browser. If I have a Private Window open, and I’m working in a regular window’s tab, there is a good chance I cannot find the Private Window when trying to go back to it. Especially if I have let a video feed play in the Private Window.
OS: MacOS 10.15.7
Why is that? It might help if you can provide some more details on what is happening. Could you be closing it as you’re exiting things? I have tested and have no issues with private windows staying open.
I mean, I know when you compare the window/tab compared to the others, they can seem the same until you switch to it. Like right now, my switcher shows:
You can’t really tell that one of those is open in Private. I mean, if you look really close, you’ll see the purple around the top, but it is indeed hard to see. I imagine a request can be put in for that to make a bigger differentiator, but it would be a low priority request.
Just means you’d have to be mindful of what you’re closing and which one is on Private. Perhaps you can even just operate completely in Private instead of doing a mix and match? Or can just use in Normal window and can toggle things like Forget me when I close this site in Shields if that’s needed.
I truly am trying to ask more on your situation and seeing if it’s as I described or if you’re experiencing something a bit different. More info would definitely be helpful for a better understanding.
This Scenario has happened quite often (but far from always):
I can have a video playing in a Private Window. I jump to a normal window and do some work, while listening to the audio on the Private Window. The video is playing in the Private Window maximized, which means that its assigned its own desktop window on Mac OS.
So, I have finished what I was working on in the Normal Window, and I want to return to the Private Window where my video is playing. I can hear the audio, but the Private Window isn’t there. It isn’t in any of the other Desktop Windows and it is not minimized. It is simply gone.
The only way to get it back, is to shut down Brave and restart it again, open a new Private Window and paste in the video link (hopefully I have remembered to save the link, since there is no History), and then try and find where in the video I was when I had to shut down Brave.
This is a fundamental problem with Brave. I saw several reports on this, but none of them had really been addressed, and the threads were closed for comments.
Just a thought, did you pay close attention to each window? I guess am wondering if it perhaps was in a different tab and you were looking for it to be on the active tab?
In any case, I will tag @Mattches in just to see if he has any ideas of what else could be happening.
Of course I pay close attention to each window. I’m a developer. This isn’t what we call an “Error 40” here (code for user mess-up). This is in fact an example of the most annoying errors there are: The infrequent ones. And I can assure you one extra time: This is down to Brave, not its users.
If it was a user error, you wouldn’t find similar reports in here over and over.
Thanks for your referral! 
Darn, guess really was hoping you’d check again and be like, “Oh, it seems this website opened and it was indeed just a tab on one of the windows.”
There’s always the hope it’s something simple. (which in many cases seems to be the case).
Yep, hopefully they’ll have a good idea. If not, might be challenging as it’s not really being reported elsewhere and I can’t replicate it myself. Only other things to get to would be to speak of extensions, testing in new profile, etc.
@bbn1,
Can you share the links of the other reports of this same behavior you found?
I’m not able to reproduce this on my end but it may have more to do with the specific OS you’re using as well. I’m also curious if you can reproduce this issue in any other browser (namely a Chromium based browser)?
