This has been a myth floating around since the early days of Chrome. I am and have for a long time been a big fan of Chrome, but it has never been light weight. It's just fast so people think of it that way. But you've always been able to check on the memory usage of tabs and see it just eating up your memory.
I agree. Chrome has NEVER been lightweight in terms of memory. Each tab is in its own sandbox environment. It will need to load resources separately for each sandbox and that chews up memory.
Chrome may be inefficient with memory but I could manage this by closing the tab. Firefox would retain the memory even after the tab has been closed for some time.
That seem's to be the desirable outcome, if the trade-off for perceived speed is a larger memory footprint. Users directly feel the speed, but are less likely to be affected by a larger memory footprint.
Just closing the tab isn't enough to release that memory though.
Lets say you have 200 tabs open, check your computers memory usage, close all of the tabs but one and see how much your memory usage drops. Then close that last tab (or fully quit the program on a mac), and see how much memory you get back.
I typically get about 1/4-1/2 of my total RAM back after closing the program entirely.
