> Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past)
I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.
I use LibreWolf (a rebranded Firefox clone with less tracking) with TST and just recently I exported a few hundred tabs I didn't care for anymore so now I am down to 2-300 tabs.
I don't think it is as lean as some versions of old Firefox, but I have no problems with 500 - 1000 tabs (and I often run it next to a full IDE + VSCode + Firefox ++).
You can disable (almost) all of that. My FF only has 3 processes overall. Needed shittons of about:config tweaking to achieve it and it's probably not security best practices:tm: but hey, it works and my browser stops eating all the RAM.
I have not found a good way besides restarting FF. There is an extension but it wasn't reliable, as in unloaded active tabs and not unloading inactive tabs. IIRC the extension API didn't have sensible hooks so it was difficult.
I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.