As long as javascript developers don't care about memory usage, I'm not sure what anyone can do. I mean, for goodness sake, an empty YouTube page with no video

As long as javascript developers don't care about memory usage, I'm not sure what anyone can do. I mean, for goodness sake, an empty YouTube page with no videos eats up a shocking amount of memory - 90 MB just for the js heap. I used to run Windows 3.1 on a machine with 8 MB of RAM. Admittedly, a good amount of memory used with browsers is because of larger graphics buffers that go along with higher resolution monitors, but much is just... waste.