At first I was going to blame all of the garbage from rockstar brogrammers, but even the simple HN comment page tab is using 264MB of RAM on macOS. The browser itself uses an additional 208MB according to Chrome's task manager, not counting all of the extensions. Where is it all going? There's 10 lines of JS on this page and a tiny amount of CSS. Has Chrome become that bloated?
This is especially annoying when many modern "desktops" apps are just Chromium wrappers that bleed memory.
Your 208MB might not be additional, but a big subset of it could be shared with the renderer/gpu process.
If you want to know where the memory is going you can go to about://tracing and enable the memory-infra category.
If you have ram and it is not being used, it is completely wasted, if you have cpu cycles and it is not being used you are just saving on battery and not over heating the laptop.
Maybe on 3 or 4K laptops. But aren't most 1388x768 or something equally dismal? Which isn't far off 1024x768. Anyways, a 1080p frame at 32bit depth is only 8MB.
Browsers are hardly low CPU, either. I'll see things idling at 10% of an i5. Which is like 200%+ of CPUs used for web browsing of yesteryear.
All this, and web pages are slower to respond. I recently used a page that loaded a grid of images. Changing by battery/throttling had a 2s impact on load time. CPU was pegged during that time.
If only that were a relevant remark. The tab with the linked Oryoki web page alone is using 250 megabytes for me. And a second tab of the same page is using an additional 230 megabytes.
Somehow I don't think that that's well utilized RAM for the ~350 kilobytes of web content. This page uses 200 megabytes as a tab, and HN isn't exactly a heavy page.