Is this a problem a browser can solve? I mean modern websites are so large with so many crappy stuff and always loading something in the background - if you have 15-20 tabs with similar background loading web sites your browser is bound to consume a lot of memory.

If I am not missing something obvious, aren't we blaming the wrong thing?

I'm not sure about that. Chrome's Task Manager says this HN post is taking 255mb and the front page 101mb.

That's weird. Chrome is only using 31 MB for both tabs for me.

Do you think it's related to the display? I'm on a 15 inch rMBP.

I see your point, but I don't find the state of things incredibly surprising anymore. Consider how huge modern web pages have grown, with a ton of poorly compressible media attachments, an embedded programming language that keeps track of plenty of state, and dozens of external resources that pull their own media and have their own state. Not to mention that we're in the middle of a responsiveness space race between browser vendors, and doing less CPU work by keeping more things in memory is one of the basic performance optimizations. With that said, as developers we have obviously been spoiled by the embarrassment of riches in terms of available hardware resources and have also contributed to the problem.

I think that really depends on what you are asking your browser to do.