I found Google Chrome makes an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM almost unusable, unless you're really careful to keep only a few tabs only. I'm curious what browser you were using and if you had any similar experience.
It was my son’s laptop , he’s in high school. General Google Classroom / Google Docs / Gmail / web research stuff. He’s not technical at all. I bought him the 8GB machine thinking it would be fine, but it became a big problem for him.
I do think part of the problem was number of tabs open. It was a little better when I taught him how to manage tabs and I also turned up all the memory saving features in chrome.
But even with all of that, it would still slow down with what looked like a pretty minimal workload.
I spent a few hours with him on it, but he still had these kinds of issues.
It just seems like it requires a decent level of sophistication to work with a small RAM budget if you’re using Google software.
I have a 8GB m1 mac mini and I dont see any issue with browsing in chrome (right now I have 11 tabs open).