Why do browsers use so much memory?

Question

Firefox with 18 tabs open = 1.34 GB of memory (~ 75 MB / tab).

Got a twitter response from another local developer, indicating that his Chrome instance used ~ 82MB / tab.

What makes web browsers consume so much memory?

Answer 1

To make it more resilient to crashes, Chrome creates many copies of itself as full-fledged processes instead of just using multithreading. This clearly consumes more memory (fewer things can be shared). Chrome puts plugins in separate processes (so Flash crashes the entire browser) ... Other memory consumption ... And so on.