...however, I was seeing huge amounts of RAM usage even with only three or four tabs open. Four webpages shouldn't be consuming over a gigabyte of RAM. I think

...however, I was seeing huge amounts of RAM usage even with only three or four tabs open. Four webpages shouldn't be consuming over a gigabyte of RAM. I think it's a mistake to equate 4 tabs with 4 web pages worth of content. Each tab actually represents a list of web pages that corresponds to that tab's history, and each element in that list is actually the root of a tree of resources needed for each of those pages, and if the user uses the back button, they often do not want to merely return to the page as it would be fetched by the request, but they also want to return to the state of the DOM as it was when they were just there, such as the state of a form they were entering. With the swipe-to-go-back interface, the previous page needs to be available pretty fast to make the UI responsive to this gesture. This smells more like a cache to me than a leak.