No matter how many other programs I am running, when I open task manager it always seems like Chrome is at 1000 or 2000+ MB of memory usage, whereas everything else barely hits 500MB
In: 32
Short answer is to keep things fast. Modern web pages are incredibly complicated, they are programs in their own right. You know how reference books will have an index at the end that lets you find the page some information you want is on without reading the entire book? Or in a library there’s the Dewey Decimal system that can tell you which shelf a book you want is on? A web page is a program that basically does this. A lot. As in thousands of times a second, particularly when a page first loads. Modern browsers will essentially take a 10mb web page and create an index that is several times the size of the web page to make the page load and do everything it needs to do.
A huge chunk of that memory footprint will be taken up by this index as well as the source code and other things to keep a web page responding to you quickly. Without that memory footprint, it would be like trying to load a modern web page on a 90’s or early 2000’s computer/browser/internet connection.
There are other considerations a well such as security sandboxing and more modern approaches such as single page apps, and they all have a memory cost. Ultimately the idea is that memory is cheap and it’s a waste to not use it if it’s there.
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