2010 Macbook Pro, 8 GB RAM, Chrome runs just great. Never believed I'd get this kind of longevity out of a laptop.

I have an old MacBook 4,1 (w/ Core 2 Duo), 4 GB RAM, lying around with the latest version of Chrome on it. It's usable, but not snappy, and you can't have dozens of tabs open or it will get sluggish fast. You have to clear the cache and restart Chrome too often.

My MacBook Pro is from 2012, but I have 16GB of RAM in it. I regularly have something like 10 windows with about 15 or so tabs in each. It can get bogged down at times, but generally works fine.

Chrome wants RAM, so I think that's the real blocker in your case.

Yes, I learned my lesson of thinking 4GB was good enough.

It's better to have 8GB minimum, but best of all to get as much ram as possible on a machine.

The extension "The Great Suspender" works wonders here; suspends tabs in the background when they've been idle, but you don't lose your place. It has singlehandedly made Chrome usable again for me, while simultaneously enabling my 40+ tab habit. 90% of the time you don't need the tab to be active, you just want it there so you can revisit later. (For me anyway.)

Another vote for The Great Suspender. It's literally a must-have for Chrome users.

I'm a tab maniac - 421 tabs open now. This wouldn't be possible without TGS (and 32GB RAM), and another extension called Tabli to index them all.

General computer buying rule: always buy as much ram as you can afford even if it seems like an insane amount at the time! One thing that drives me nuts about phones and tablets. I want to pay more money for more, more ram. Nothing impacts your devices life span more than the amount of ram.

I've found recent versions of Firefox to be surprisingly much zippier than Chrome and w much lower memory usage as well (especially w uBlock Origin).