Given how I work on multiple projects in parallel in the day-to-day and have dozens (if not hundreds) of tabs open in any tab workspace (see also https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/-/issues/1835 regarding workspaces), one of the things that has become indispensable for me, even with large amounts of RAM (ex: 24 GB), is the ability for the browser to auto-unload (a.k.a. "discard") tabs from RAM when unused for a long time and too many are open. Currently, you can achieve this on Firefox (and now Chrome, by default). Some reference material: * https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-save-system-memory-firefox * https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/10/tab-unloading-in-firefox-93/ * https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ This saves tremendous amounts of RAM (and, in Firefox's case, CPU) in practice. Apple gave up on that idea in macOS, from what I heard and from what I can see in bug #162865, where they say: > […] they page out to disk and stay there That sounds a lot like the kind of "tab unloading" I'd want on Linux, too, but I don't seem to be seeing it in practice? In any case, any form of tab unloading from would be needed on Linux, given how horrible Linux is as handling out-of-memory conditions. In the case of browsers like Epiphany, this would also mitigate the problem of inotify handles (see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/-/issues/1454) Would it be possible/feasible for WebKitGTK to empower WebKitGTK-based browsers to: * do the same thing as Safari's WebKit (paging out the whole thing to disk) but configurably by the browser's built-in UIs (and/or webextensions like "Auto Tab Discard"; the request for API for that is bug #265970), and much more aggressively by default? * otherwise would it be possible for it to completely unload like Chrome and Firefox do? I don't see how those browsers could scale for lots of tabs otherwise. Merely opening 15 tabs eats 5-6 GB of RAM until you fully close them…