Now multiply that across all apps/services/extensions/profiles and it adds up.

This kind of lazy thinking is why today’s software is so bloated and slow.

"Saving X% of RAM" isn't a thing because RAM is itself a cache of compressed swap space and/or mapped files.

The lesson here is pointer-chasing data structures and trees are a lot more expensive than everyone and most programming languages like to pretend they are.

These days you’re getting 4GB at that price point and you’re losing memory to the OS thus user space memory is even more constrained.

It's more than that, because generally performance is also much worse if you're using a shit ton of memory. That's because CPUs are bottlenecked by cache. So more memory means cache has to be flushed more often, and there will be more misses, which can greatly impact performance.

Smartphone producers already announced to cut ram this year... Just FYI

OK now do the math for someone who has 200 tabs open. Remember that basically all browsers these days spin up one process per tab.

4GB of that taken by the system. more memory use with runtimes also means more cpu to track and free memory.

This kind of attitude is why everything is so bloated nowadays...

130USD for 8GB RAM will be a good price for a bare DIMM in two weeks.