Which browser are you using? I've got no issue with around 50 tabs in Firefox in a similar laptop. But maybe I don't visit the same memory heavy websites.
It's usually gcc that eats up all my memory, turns out with template metaprogramming a single gcc instance can eat 3GB of RAM, and I usually build with 6 parallel instances. Thankfully I've got plentiful SSD-backed swap so I don't feel the system becoming too unresponsive.