Returning to your original point: I've been working on Firefox's memory consumption for about three years now. There are quite a few people who take your viewpoint. But there are also plenty of people who care very deeply about memory usage. Some of this makes sense, e.g. from people who are on low-end machines. But some of it is less rational... there is a subset of people for which memory consumption is almost a moral issue, and excessive usage indicates the general decay of western civilization, or something like that.