It’s not the browsers. It’s the single-page apps.

I can have 50 HN or readthedocs tabs open in Firefox with negligible memory impact. But two to three tabs of apps (say, Gmail and Trello) or a handful of over-engineered news and blog articles, and it’s swap city plus beach balls from CPU usage. And that’s WITH ad blocking on.

On Mac, Safari is the least awful offender, but the bar is pretty low.

Yes, I've been having the same issue since about the time I upgraded our 8 year old home laptop (8 GB RAM) from Ubuntu 16 to Ubuntu 18. I had to switch to LUbuntu to keep the system usable, but Web browsing still grinds to a halt if I leave a gmail tab open too long.

same same, I recently bought a second-hand laptop for $150, an i5, came with 4 gigs and I bumped it up to 8 gigs and installed ubuntu, I use firefox.

I noticed facebook, gmail and a few other sites really killed performance, the interface would freeze with high swap and cpu.

I keep them closed now, I use session manager to start and stop sessions.

I tried a tab suspender, it used to work fine but I'm not sure what happened to it, eventually it disappeared from firefox addons website and someone started a new project, but I got weird issues with other extensions like ublock origin crashing with the tab suspender running, whereas they are fine when the tab suspender is disabled.

So, for now, I only start facebook and gmail when I'm using them and close them when I'm not.

Edit: before firefox containers were a thing I had a profile for different tasks, one for facebook, one for google, etc, to try and limit tracking. I have no idea how effective that is, I'm thinking not very. But anyway, that's also a handy way to start and stop sessions. You have the setting to restore the previous session, and when you exit and start it up again, only the tab with focus gets loaded into memory, the other tabs load when you click them. So you can have 20 tabs opened and restarting the profile only loads one tab, then others load on demand.

Have you given Safari and to a lesser extent Edge a go? I have the same experience with Chromium based browsers, less so with Firefox. I find Safari heavily optimised, its just bad with reloading/repainting the page when using the back button.

I think the problem is the guys making Chrome have 256G of RAM on their dev machines and hardly ever have the constraints of a normal use situation. Optimising RAM usage doesn't seem to be a priority.

No such problem on an i5 7th gen with 8 GB ram. I use both Windows 10 and Ubuntu on it. Sometimes I have 20-25 tabs on my firefox. Maybe you should check your browser addons.

No. At work I run both chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu simultaneously with multiple tabs open. At home with Firefox on Debian. Never had problems.

Although both computers have 16gb ram.

I don't have any problem on both laptop (MacBook Pro, 16GB) and desktop (Mac Mini, 8GB). I usually open 20-30 tabs. Did you try disable some plugins?