And in typical Google fashion, they have assumed that devices have an infinite amount of memory: https://imgur.com/zkh7C (this is with the app in the background!)
What else are you going to use the RAM for? Hell, you have 45MB wasted right there!
If the OS refuses to kill the app under memory pressure then you have a point. Until someone demonstrates this, you're being a bit more than disingenuous.
Well, that's what memory is made for right? You could also not run any apps and enjoy 300MB of unused memory, but that wouldn't be very useful. Android has a very nice system in place that manages its memory.
It's almost like they set minimum system requirements and then users installed it on phones that didn't meet them yet they felt the need to complain even though it still ran on their phones.
Look - as I said in my other comment, the issue isn't that it uses a tonne of memory. The stock browser does so too. The issue is that it is using that memory in such a way that it is evicted too late. The app is multi-process, but they're putting background services in the wrong process - they run in the main process that you'd expect to be heavy on memory usage. So instead of the memory-heavy UI stuff being evicted shortly after the UI goes away, it is evicted after all other background (multitasking) processes - including the launcher - have also gone away.
Note that my screenshot shows the active (i.e., not background processes that can be thrown away at any time) section of the running processes screen.
Why bigot your statement with such a ridiculous lead-in?
On my Gingerbread device the browser right now, in the background, is using 67.15MB. What does that demonstrate? Nothing, given that the RAM was available and web browsing is one of, if not the most, complex activities you can do.
I should have qualified my statement by mentioning that the Chrome app process runs a couple of background services - this causes it to be killed for low memory after normal background processes (the actual behaviour is a little more complex than that, but that's the gist of it), which could potentially impact the performance of multitasking. The proper thing to do is to run background services in a separate process from the UI or whatever uses the most memory so that the latter can be evicted more quickly.
I stand by my assertion that optimising for memory isn't a priority at Google. An Android engineer poignantly put it (sorry, can't remember who) when they bragged on G+ that Android 4.0.3 was the first time since Gingerbread that they'd run the OS on a <1G RAM device (namely Nexus S). Then again, as an actual embedded engineer (none of this gigs of RAM crap!), all I care about is memory usage...
Given the context and the joking tone (complete with smiley), I think you're reading way too much into the comment. Given the devices ICS had been shipped on at the time, she could have just as easily said it was the first time in a year that they'd shipped Android on: