But a larger point is that I disagree with the trend of using more hardware for doing less but taking the same quantum of running time , especially so when there are easy non-onerous alternatives. Much that anyone may want to manage my expenses, doing it this way frees up money that I can spend elsewhere, where I am more keen.

This box of mine is not worth spending more money over, but useful enough that its a loss if I junk it.

...what if the user has a high-end machine with 16GB of RAM? Then paging isn’t an issue. But this improvement will still be a big deal on such a machine. This is because garbage collection and cycle collection cause pauses, and the length of the pauses are roughly proportional to the amount of live heap memory. (Incremental garbage collection will soon be enabled, which will result in smaller garbage collection pauses, but there are no plans for incremental cycle collection and so cycle collection pauses will still be relevant.) So even on high-end machines with lots of RAM, leaks can greatly hurt browser performance.