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Of course, it's not the actual downloaded text that takes up all that memory. It's not like programs take up gobs of memory because the programmers were being lazy and disdainful.

No, it's the internal representation of the markup, and the program state of all of the javascript programs a page might incorporate, that takes up a lot of memory.

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That is obvious. What is less obvious is how much memory you can waste for the internal representation. I would expect that the memory footprint of a well-designed browser should be dominated roughly by the download size (w/out taking into account the javascript code, which could keep a lot of state around).

> should be dominated roughly by the download size

Well, judging by the graphs in the linked article this is clearly something that every browser vendor experiences. I imagine that the trade off in speedy page rendering is having a lot of memory intensive data structures.

It's prolly more complicated than we give them credit for.

I've never liked the griping about memory use - if you're not swapping out to disk then you're perfectly fine. I'm much more concerned with having firefox occupying a whole core if I leave it unattended with too many js intensive tabs open.

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