In fact, firefox' and chromes example is the bane of my existence. The recovery feature itself takes a good amount of space. However efficient it may be, it's no use for private sessions. I'm aware of tab suspender add ons but never tried it. You can't tell me to clean up the ship and instead you burn it down and let it sink in the ocean? Is it my messy browsing (400 tabs can grow to 8gb quickly and it should always remain snappy, too, no eager unloading) or is that just symptomatic of a let it crash darwinism? It is indeed just as impossible for me to memorize all the pages, 90% wikipedia articles and related content, nothing important I'm sure. But it is utterly ridiculous that a gif which rendered would take hundreds of megabytes is a surefire way to crash the session that had been skimming the edge of 200 mb free resident memory left for weeks. I had resorted to polling 'free' frequently for display in a taskbar plugin. But sometimes over night something would hog memory and not free it, either a systems cron-job, an aberrant javascript (though no-script was rarely "temporarily" disabled) or a memory leak (same thing?).
Of course a browser with leaks could not be expected to handle oom gracefully.