PROTIP: Use noscript to take RAM requirements back to 2007.
I'm on a 2GB Laptop with XP typing this and the fan is silent. SILENT. The second I turn noscript off it overloads, then of course, crashes. Some scripts are running constantly in the background, with click tracking and even mouse motion tracking becoming more commonplace.
Also using RequestPolicy addon on Firefox will dramatically cut down on stuff loaded from 3rd-party websites (including: Google analytics, Facebook like button, ad- and tracking services of all kind)
And as an added bonus, you're reclaiming a lot of your online privacy. Unless that was your main reason to install all these addons in the first place (as is the case for myself). It also tends to speed up page load times, often by magnitudes, because of all the crap some sites want to load.
I've been doing this since years and I seriously do not understand when people complain about extreme RAM usage of their browser. I have 4GB of RAM and often sit at 50-100+ tabs for weeks and don't really have any issues - Firefox Nightly is currently hogging ~16% of my memory according to htop - which is perfectly okay.
I don't have any strategies, really. I just never had problems with a clogged RAM to begin with.
Concerning crashes (which became incredibly rare after I decided to just not have Flash installed anymore[1]), Firefox usually is able to just restore the session. I can't actually remember if I ever had the issue of "loosing" all my opened tabs.
A lot of my open tabs are children (I use Tree Style Tabs) of sites like HN, which I just keep open and refresh every now and then to see if the discussion has progressed, or a tree of tabs dealing with a specified topic (for example if I am researching something, or a web-shop where I just left open some interesting articles). And then there are tabs which are just open because I forgot to close them. I clean up every now and then.
[1] This is seriously baffling. I'd wager that >90% of all browser crashes can, in some way or another, be attributed to Flash. I have nothing to back up that claim, it's just anecdotal experience, but I thought this was worth mentioning.
I'm on a 2GB Laptop with XP typing this and the fan is silent. SILENT. The second I turn noscript off it overloads, then of course, crashes. Some scripts are running constantly in the background, with click tracking and even mouse motion tracking becoming more commonplace.