[transcriptase]

I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.

[m-schuetz]

The high memory usage is due to the optimization. Responsiveness, robustness and performance was improved by making each tab independent processes. And that's good. Nobody needs 80 tabs, that's what bookmarks are for.

[lukan]

"that's what bookmarks are for"

And if you are lucky, the content will still be there the next time.

[abenga]

Is there a straightforward way to have one-process-per tab in browsers without using significant amounts (O(n_tabs)) of memory?

[samus]

There is no justification for that IMHO. The program text only needs to be in memory once. However, each process probably has its own instance of the JS engine, together with the website's heap data and the JIT-compiled code objects. That adds up.

[abenga]

I'd very much like a crash in one tab not to kill other tabs. And having per tab sandboxing would be more secure, no?

[samus]

What do you mean? All these features are provided by process per tab.