Comment Not all PCs have 8 GB of RAM (Score 1) 107
modern computers start with 8gig of memory
Is the ASUS Transformer Book, a 10" convertible laptop computer, not "modern" because it ships with only 2 GB of RAM?
Besides, not all computers still in use are modern. I do most of my web browsing on a four-year-old Dell Inspiron mini 1012, a 10" laptop that came with only 1 GB of RAM and runs Xubuntu. Flashblock helps keeps Firefox below half a GB, after which point the bottleneck is not memory but the fact that Firefox uses only half of the CPU. Though an Atom has two-way simultaneous multithreading, Firefox is still single-threaded which brings a longer wait for complicated JavaScript and CSS to finish processing, especially on things like Cracked.com or Slashdot beta. My first-generation ASUS Nexus 7 tablet computer is stuck at 1 GB as well.
and then there's the page file/swap space.
A lot of computers without a rotating hard drive, such as my Nexus 7, can't afford to swap. Instead, they have a harsher OOM killer.
Firefox is a browser meant for browsing... and if that's what you're doing with it, that 1gig of memory is nothing. What background apps are using up the other 7gig?
I'm guessing that when no application is using part of the RAM, the chipset could power down unused RAM to prolong battery life.