Why does firefox use so much memory?

[Energize]

Firefox version 3.66 with 10 tabs open.

 

[Energize]

I do agree that browsers have a far larger memory footprint than they perhaps should do, but in this day and age why not? 430MB is nothing compared to the the amount of ram that is shipped in new builds these days as standard. It makes sense to use the abundant fast memory store than swapping to the slow disk store.

Well it slows down application loading times as the browsers data has to be swapped when the memory is needed by something else.

 

[Energize]

Restarted firefox and it's now 106MB, just goes all over the place.