Chrome is the container housing that website the developer decided to include 15 libraries at 50 meg each because he couldn't be bothered to optimize shit and that's just "standard" now. Oh and tack on the 15 scripts running to mine your data and load unfiltered ads into your userspace.
Get more ram pleb, it's cheap.... has been the excuse for ages. Makes it easy to ignore the problem.
Don't get me wrong- chrome is a pig... but in general it's the dogshit-bad coding and development choices that turn even a small page into a massive footprint.
I don't believe it's only chrome's problem. I've noticed that firefox tends to lock all available memory to himself
and whenever I need it, bastard just reallocates it into swap, making whole system laggy and slow.
So.... I've got my foxy friend into a Ram jail for being too hungry: systemd-run --scope -p MemoryMax=1G --user firefox
I use FF on Manjaro and have never noticed a ram problem. I've also got it set up on a different virtual linux machine with only 2 gigs of memory and it works fine.
I think the main issue is with web pages. Seems instead of optimizing them nowadays they are just bloated to the vague level they think one can get away with in terms of average hardware run by the users.
I watched an amazing documentary on YouTube, made at the time of Apollo 11 that showed how the computers worked. It absolutely blew me away.
The way they did so much with so little was incredible. There was no such thing as flashing firmware to a chip; they hard coded the bits and bytes by hand. BY HAND.
That's like hiring people to count the grains of sand on a beach. Amazing!
But even using Fedora Chromium, with like all policy switches set to degoogle, Googles removed as search engine, no online Account, Chromium still pings Google when
choosing Accounts (all offline)
loading the installed (!) Addons
going to settings
viewing the password manager (with everything GUI for Password checking etc disabled)
I ran googerteller to check that
sudo dnf install gcc make
git clone https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller.git
cd googerteller
cmake .
make
sudo tcpdump -nql | ./teller