Exactly. People get mad when things on their system are using the memory they purchased. The only problem is when it's actually using the memory and Windows starts dying because other programs aren't freeing up enough memory.

Same thing for chrome - often people say "chrome eats your RAM" but it's just being as efficient as it can be - if your OS asks it to free ram, it will and 8GB of webpages can go down to 4GB at the expense of getting rid of cached "back" pages and other cached memory.

The problem is, that at least in my experience chrome never does that. Which is why I recently had only 5g "available" (not free), and it was all swap, because Chrome had been a degenerate example of resource mismanagement on all of my computers since it was first released. I have yet to see Chrome free memory in way other than murdering the render process myself or closing the tabs and hoping it wasn't a shared process one, at least on Linux.

I'm curious, how does the OS tell Chrome to free memory? Because as far as I know, there's no API to check if another program needs memory.