Memory footprint is my big issue with this too. Related, I've noticed chat for various projects slowly migrating from IRC to Slack and have the same issue there. What could have been another irssi window taking up an insignificant amount of memory is now a 150Mb Chrome tab.

To make matters worse, memory growth has stagnated. A Macbook Pro today, to give an example has the same maximum RAM (16Gb) it did in 2010. That's zero memory growth in 7 years for a popular developer machine.