This is a pretty basic, "and what's the deal with airline food??" kinda observation, but
It's just been brought to my attention that a Chrome tab takes up a minimum of 24 to 28 MB of RAM*, even if it's looking at about:blank or an empty HTML page. There are good engineering reasons it might work this way but I am also thinking about how my first computer-shaped computer** had 4 MB of RAM and that was like, an OS plus sophisticated full apps. Later we upgraded to 8 MB RAM and that was a big deal
