As a counterpoint I currently have over 130 tabs open and my machine isn't breaking a sweat. The secret is leaving Javascript disabled by default and selectively enabling it on a per-tab basis only when needed. This strategy works great if the main thing you're looking at is documentation.
The 4G isn't for building or running code, it's for tons of browser tabs open with documentation. I routinely have >10 tabs open, and that's quite likely to cause swapping on 1G RAM.
Sure, I could slim everything down by running a tiling window manager instead of a desktop environment or configuring my browser to unload older tabs (or close and reopen with bookmarks), but that takes extra time, and if time is money, that money is better spent on a few extra gigs of RAM.