I've been experiencing some serious lag with my Brave browser lately. It's consuming an insane amount of RAM—up to 4 GB with just about 9 tabs open, and I only have a few extensions installed: uBlock, Privacy Badger, Violent Monkey, and Bitwarden. I checked the task manager in the browser, and it seems like the extensions aren't the main culprits. YouTube tends to use a lot of RAM, around 600-800 MB per tab, but I usually don't even have any YouTube tabs open. I've tried updating my browser but haven't reinstalled it yet since I don't want to lose my data like cookies. At this point, I'm wondering if I should switch to another browser. I've tried almost everything except Firefox, mainly because I'm not a fan of its interface. The lag gets so bad that my mouse feels like it's lagging behind by 20 frames, and the browser frequently freezes. My computer is quite powerful, so I don't understand why this is happening.
4 Answers
Brave tends to use a lot of RAM, especially when YouTube is involved. If you're still experiencing freezes even with decent hardware, switching browsers might be your best bet.
4 GB for a browser does seem pretty high! I usually have Discord running alongside YouTube, and I'm already at about that much too. Make sure to check the browser's task manager—it's Shift + Esc in Brave. You might see what's actually using up all that memory.
Your operating system manages the RAM, so let it handle the workload. How much RAM does your system even have? Have you tried simply refreshing the browser? Since Brave is Chromium-based, it shares some similarities with other browsers.
I've got 16 GB of RAM and I've tried refreshing it. This issue has been happening for about 2 weeks now.
Have you considered removing all your extensions instead of just disabling them? Some of them, like ad blockers, can have memory issues, especially with YouTube.
I've done that for a while, but even when the RAM is low, it still lags and freezes. Someone suggested switching to Vivaldi, so I might give that a shot.