I don't believe a browser couldn't be designed to have a small RAM footprint. All my tabs could be suspended and saved to disk when in the background (and not spinning any tasks). They can be read back into RAM near instantly when I tab back to them
My Chromebook with 8Gb ram has dozens of tabs and web apps open in Chrome, runs one VM with Android and another VM with Linux in turn running Firefox and more. All without breaking a sweat.
Works beautifully. I have to restart the computer about once a month because of Catalina bugs, but Firefox is super stable.
I shut down my laptop at the end of the day and turn it back on the day after, regardless of bugs. Why do you try to reboot it as little as possible?
Shutdown takes 20 seconds. Startup requires the FileVault password, then 20-30 seconds, then a login, then another 20-30 seconds until desktop is usable (and a few more until Firefox is).
If this was my work computer, it wouldn’t be so inconvenient to restart / shutdown once a day. But for what reason?
I’ll replace it when it breaks.
With respect to power draw - there is no simple way to force hibernation on Catalina AFAIK, but the power draw in sleep is minuscule - it hardly registers on my wattmeter (and e.g. it loses only 2-3% percent per day of battery while sleeping).
I'm similar, I prefer maintaining state with things until I'm done with them, which makes the current models so frustrating, for all Apple talked about skeuomorphism, for me it's always felt so fake, it's only ever skin deep, I open a webpage and until I'm done with it, it should stay that way.
I've navigated down a third of the page? I've partially filled in a form field? Keep it! There's probably a reason I put that there!
It's not like when I put a piece of paper down on my desk it resets to it's original appearance and orientation every morning. It retains the scribbles and notes! Maybe you like someone else tidying your desk every morning, but I hate it!
Real things exist, our memories exploit these properties so well and what do we get, software that's all about returning to some pristine state that makes it harder for me to recall and use.
I'm curious if they're going to do this same thing with their spatial os, or whether they'll work out that persisting things until people are done with them is a feature.
Sometimes I also use stand-by or, if it is to keep the state up until the next day, hibernation. But that's rare. In most cases, I just use Firefox's function to restore my previous browsing session. That would not restore half-filled forms, but I rarely deal with forms, especially long ones. As for reading or editing documents, most software will open the document at the point you where when you last closed it.
Plenty of people still use systems with 4GB and lower and it works fine as long as the number of tabs they open is limited.