Ads mean iframes, which mean tons of separate DOMs, which are heavy and expensive.

You also have to consider that images are decompressed for display; that 474x350 image in the lead spot on the Techcrunch homepage is 474 * 359 * 4 = 663,600 bytes in RAM, plus any overhead. When you consider how image-heavy sites have become, that's a lot of memory that can disappear in a hurry.

> a single webpage that should mainly be text communicating a message

That was more or less true of the web in, say, 1995.

Today, a web browser is an advanced programming environment with broad multimedia capabilities (including audio, video, and 2D and 3D graphics) that also happens to have some excellent document presentation features relating to text and images.

(Edit: I previously said this much better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743284)

You may think this is a bad thing, and that's a reasonable opinion to have. But if you think it's not true you'll only mislead yourself.

> Today, a web browser is an advanced programming environment with broad multimedia capabilities

It doesn't matter what the tool is to you. When we're visiting something like techcrunch, we're there for the text and then maybe a few pictures.

Not if it has rendered the text out so that scrolling is super smooth, in addition to the javascript, css and html parsing and optimization overhead. Don't forget the pictures too.

I think of the modern web as analogous to Windows: bloated and complex. I'd much rather have a Unix-web than a Windows-web.

I find that absurdly crazy. My Firefox sessions usually see between 300 to 1200 tabs open at a time. Now I understand why I need to keep crashing it to force the GC. I wish all tabs idle for longer than 5 minutes would be collected by the GC. I just need the tabs open for reference organization (like the History but with nestedness since I use Tree Style Tab) but I don't need all of them in RAM.

> I wish all tabs idle for longer than 5 minutes would be collected by the GC

I didn't check if they still work with new Firefox versions but there are extensions that exactly do this.