1) Most browsers will by design utilise up to a percentage of available memory, so posting screenshots to say "ooh, it's using more memory than I expect", doesn't mean very much.
2) I've seen every major browser do most of the things described in this thread at one time or another in the last few years.
3) I doubt that any of you can think of a piece of software that has to handle as much abuse as a web browser does:
3a) Dodgy site coding (every time that someone writes a bit of iffy code for a website you've visited, the browser tries to render it as well as handle as many types of iffy code as possible).
3b) Somewhere along the way, it has seemingly become expected of a browser that it should run for many hours or days on end. Why? Is that something you do without a break?
3c) Browser software is attacked with malicious intent infinitely more than any other piece of software.
Bearing point 3a in mind, there is not going to be one dodgy bit of behaviour that causes all your woes, but likely hundreds. A test case needs to be found for each of those then the coding issue needs to be found and fixed.
I think if most people were using browser software for some sort of essential work purpose, they would treat it a bit nicer (which is what most of these problems are exacerbated by) - for example, I doubt that when you're writing your CV or some essential document for work/uni, you've also got 16 other documents open in that software, some of which have been open for several hours, containing things like "my top ten favourite kitten pictures/videos" that someone sent you, as well as advertising, third party plug-ins, documents written in another word processor whose capability of saving documents in the format that your software is used to is, shall we say, sub-optimal, and you've opened a tonne of other documents in that session without restarting the software at all.
I'm not saying these (browser) issues are 100% caused by user error, however, for example, restarting your browser from time to time really wouldn't hurt. Most browsers have a restore session option these days which will at least mitigate the problems you're experiencing. Also, what unnecessary plug-ins and semi-necessary add-ons / personas / themes do you have installed?
Browser resource management issues should be fixed, but something tells me that they're somewhat more difficult to fix than most of you hope. You're basically asking "why isn't this software perfect yet?".
Facebook
Twitter