I'm wondering where the memory useage really comes from. I'm coming from an dev culture where if I do things right, i can trust the underlying system I built on to make it run fast enough and use up as little resources as it can, so most of the performance & optimization work comes from me.

Are the underlying systems running web applications (aka browsers) doing it wrong? Or are the webapp devs not doing what needs to be done in general? Or am I raising a false alarm and is everything alright?

As for my macbook, it has an unrelated problem, that's for sure, but all it does is magnify the memory issues for me.