I agree that this is completely getting out of hand. Memory was (and still is) very cheap but we are reaching a limit. The problem is that there is little we can do about it. I doubt that both Mozilla and Google don't know that their browsers consume disproportionate amounts of memory. But developing a web browser isn't easy and I assume a huge memory footprint is unavoidable. I've often wondered whether the problem lies not with the web developers nor with the programmers but in the expressiveness of the HTML+CSS+Javascript combination. This allows an enormous diversity in websites. But I assume that storing an exhaustive amount of metrics for each element on a page can be quite some data.
I wouldn't say your macbook is useless though. I have only one computer and it's a 2008 laptop with 2 GB RAM. And I cope very well, although I experience the occasional lockup (I don't use swap).
I'm wondering where the memory useage really comes from. I'm coming from an dev culture where if I do things right, i can trust the underlying system I built on to make it run fast enough and use up as little resources as it can, so most of the performance & optimization work comes from me.
Are the underlying systems running web applications (aka browsers) doing it wrong? Or are the webapp devs not doing what needs to be done in general? Or am I raising a false alarm and is everything alright?
As for my macbook, it has an unrelated problem, that's for sure, but all it does is magnify the memory issues for me.
I've considered it, but I wonder whether I don't better buy a whole new laptop instead of cobbling this one up, but that's a lot of money and this one works fine, so I keep postponing it.
But really, buying more RAM is only a temporary solution. I sometimes feel like the memory demands of web browsers are out of line and I wonder what causes that.
Because I used to think I didn't need it and it's a bit of hassle. I also thought swap was almost useless because of the comparatively slow speed of hard drives and that I'd rather have the memory hogging process killed than my computer lock up completely.
I wouldn't say your macbook is useless though. I have only one computer and it's a 2008 laptop with 2 GB RAM. And I cope very well, although I experience the occasional lockup (I don't use swap).