Ctrl+tab'd thru all 56 tabs in this group, waited for them to finish loading, opened activity monitor: CPU at 20%, RAM at 811MB. So yea, a fair amount weren't loaded, but loading them didn't make too big of a difference.
CPU at 20%, "loading didn't make too much of a difference"??? 20% is obscene for a process without interaction. Imagine a paused video player taking 20%, or a minimised word editor. Even at 58 videos or documents.
You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.
I don't forget, I just don't forgive. It's unacceptable either way. Someone has to take responsibility---might as well start with the browser. Then we can push it down from there; maybe if browsers were held accountable for pages' resource usage they'd implement resource controls. Like they currently do with limiting setTimeout on inactive pages, but more comprehensively. And maybe they'd implement better inspection tools for resource usage (chrome was ahead of the game; I'm looking at you, Firefox )
This is a huge problem. Javascript has become a blight on the web, and browsers really need to make it easier to manage stopping scripts on background tabs and such.
Well hell, maybe it's time for me to look at FF again. I switched away because it was a memory hog... And now chrome's a memory hog. I read that they made improvements, but 800MB for 240+ tabs is pretty good.