The OP described the current design: >with say 30 tabs open, 3+ GB is gone, chrome is such a dominant memory consumer! in fact it takes about 10X more memory t

The OP described the current design: >with say 30 tabs open, 3+ GB is gone, chrome is such a dominant memory consumer! in fact it takes about 10X more memory than everything else combined The last words in OP's post were "is this a design fault?" Yes.