Random thread about browsers and memory:
I recently got to use a laptop with 32 GB RAM on a job which is overkill but did allow you to run a ton of development tools without worrying about memory.

On a more normal laptop with 8 GB RAM, running Ubuntu takes far less than 1 GB. However browsers can easily suck up the rest. However, IMHO the operating system should protect itself from memory freezes no matter how many tabs the user has open.

If the browser is using so much RAM that the mouse and keyboard support are queued behind the browser, the user will feel like the system is frozen, even if Linux might think it is managing resources fine. I am not the only one to have noticed this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/419406/chrome-eats-all-ram-and-freezes-system

It happened to me yesterday, and yes I did have a large amount of tabs open. I went to the loo and came back and Linux had killed the browser eventually. However, memory management doesn't seem like something that the user should have to care about.

This person has set up a key combination to kill the browser when the system starts to run out of memory. Again this seems like a fix for a problem that should never be presented to the user, the user should not be manually managing memory.
https://development.robinwinslow.uk/2015/09/26/prepare-for-ubuntu-freezing/

Going back to the start of this thread, I wonder if this is partly caused by operating system and browser developers being given very high end laptops. Still what about integration testing, is anyone doing that? And is that happening on AWS machines with basically infinite RAM?