Basically, in Chrome (and chromium-based browsers like Brave) every tab has its own process in windows. Essentially each new tab is treated like its own self-contained instance of Chrome, rather than living as objects together within a single instance of chrome.
This makes the browser more secure, since each tab has its own memory space in the OS and isn’t supposed to share memory with the other tabs.
But the side effect is that there’s a lot of overhead.
Firefox is a bit more memory-efficient because it separates the tabs within the app’s own memory space rather than using separate OS-managed memory spaces.
The long and short of it is, Chrome can possibly be more secure since tabs are prohibited from talking to each other by the OS. This uses more resources. Firefox can be more memory efficient because it’s the browser itself isolating tabs rather than spinning up new instances of the browser for every tab.
At least that’s how I understand how it works at a very basic and oversimplified level. And this is the model I learned several years ago. It could be different now.
Functionally, I see no major security or privacy differences between Brave and Firefox. Although there are some addons for firefox that aren’t available for chromium-based browsers. For example NoScript. Although uMatrix attempts to duplicate that functionality in Chromium browsers.
Personally I just like firefox. But the way I have it setup breaks a lot of websites because I don’t allow most scripting by default. So FF has become my everyday casual browser.
If I need to do things like banking or ecomm, I actually use Brave because it offers a high level of security while still being mostly compatible. I don’t think it’s quite as good by default as my custom Firefox setup, but I trust it to be good enough with the “Shields Up”.
