> this is mainly due to having many images on your website (memory can store uncompressed images to save CPU cycles when rendering)

If your webpage has that many images, you need to redesign your webpage. An uncompressed image at my screen resolution is 21MB - your webpage needs ten times that in memory? For maybe 500 words of prose and some meme/cat picture?

Modern web design is just so bad that they can't help themselves from this madness. A modern webpage needs 10+ iframes? Absolutely bullshit.

Well, considering I work at a car classifieds site, and there are usually about 20 photos that may be on any given page, and in the new search boxes will be even bigger, and with retina screens wanting 2x images, I'd say yes.. there are sites that really need that much space for images.

Not that all or most do.. but there are a lot of really nice sites that use a lot of large images for full content display. Other techniques can be used to reserve space and load when a section comes into view, but that's not always prudent.

Images are crucial, and optimizing your rendering is also becoming more crucial.. just the same, not everything on the web is text.. and I'd say people spend more time on the web looking at pictures than text, not to mention video.

Well considering you're an outlier, I probably shouldn't waste my time replying, but because you felt the need, I will reciprocate.

The average web page is what we're talking about here. Even your page which is demonstrably unaverage should not be hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of raw images.

Images are crucial, but running a car classified site, you should know how to properly demand load images and not just have the page load every image unscaled as soon as you hit the page. Thumbnailing was properly figured out in the 1990s, we've only added fanciness to it over the intervening decades. And even at "retina" sizes, thumbnails are a pittance in the memory budget for a webpage - if you went nuts and had 640x480 "retina thumbnails" for 20 cars, that's still only 24.6MB uncompressed. Feel free to rerun the math with your own numbers on your own time.

Since it needs repeating, we're talking about the average webpage coming in at 200MB. Give yourself some logos and a few other UI images and you're still talking nowhere near 50MB of decompressed images on the page. Yet, that's only a quarter of the page's size in memory. Somehow the DOM, Javascript engine, iframes and UI element layout are costing the other 150MB. And that's where I call bullshit. That's how nasty and tangled and batshit insane modern web design has become.

And we're not discussing video here at all, since video is probably one of most insane things about the modern web: either you're forced to use Flash which is basically like running an entire second browser rendering engine inside of your browser, just to download, decode, and play some video, or you're lucky and can use HTML5 at which point the overhead beyond audio/video decompression buffers (which people will be doing in Javascript soon enough, yay!), the setup for the OS's multimedia engine, and a small bit of DOM is inconsequential in comparison to the video stream itself. This makes the amount of space video takes on the client at best unpredictable and at worst, terrible to think about.

Every iDevice other than the iPad Air 2 has only 1GB of ram, and that's an issue for them (source: search every mention of the iPad Air and RAM, especially since the Air 2 came out).