I agree that this is completely getting out of hand. Memory was (and still is) very cheap but we are reaching a limit. The problem is that there is little we can do about it. I doubt that both Mozilla and Google don't know that their browsers consume disproportionate amounts of memory. But developing a web browser isn't easy and I assume a huge memory footprint is unavoidable. I've often wondered whether the problem lies not with the web developers nor with the programmers but in the expressiveness of the HTML+CSS+Javascript combination. This allows an enormous diversity in websites. But I assume that storing an exhaustive amount of metrics for each element on a page can be quite some data.

I wouldn't say your macbook is useless though. I have only one computer and it's a 2008 laptop with 2 GB RAM. And I cope very well, although I experience the occasional lockup (I don't use swap).