> We've saved a fair bit on cloud costs

our company just went with the "server in the basement" approach, with every employee having a user account (no VM or docker separation, just normal file permissions). Sure, sounds like the 80s, but it works rearly well. Remote access with wireguard, uptime similar or better than cloud, sharing the same beefy CPUs works well and gives good utilization. Running jobs that need hundreds of GB of RAM isn't an issue as long as you respect other's needs too dont hog the RAM all day. And in amortized costs per employee its dirt cheap. I only wish we had more GPUs.

> Interesting. I required all my devs to use local VMs for development.

It doesn’t work when you’re developing on a large database, since it won’t fit. Database (and data warehouse) development has been held back from modern practices just for this reason.

For many companies, IP isn’t allowed to leave environments controlled by the company, which employee laptops are not.

Current job used to let us run containers locally, but they decided to wrap initially docker, and then podman with "helper" scripts. These broke regularly, and became too much overhead to maintain so we are mandated to do local dev but access a dev k8 cluster to perform any level of testing that is more than unit and requires a db.

A really shame as running local docker/podman for postges was fine when you just ran the commands.

Regarding wanting to preserve the current version of a page: I use Karakeep to archive those pages. I am sure there are other similar solutions such as downloading an offline version, but this works well for me.

I do this mostly for blog posts etc I might not get around to reading for weeks or months from now, and don't want them to disappear in the meantime.

Everything else is either a pinned tab (<5) or a bookmark (themselves shared when necessary on e.g a Slack canvas so the whole team has easy access, not just me).

While browsing the rest of my tabs are transient and don't really grow. I even mostly use private browsing for research, and only bookmark (or otherwise save) pages I deem to be of high quality. I might have a private window with multiple tabs for a given task, but it is quickly reduced to the minimum necessary pages and the the whole private window is thrown away once the initial source material gathering is done. This lets me turn off address bar search engines and instead search only saved history and bookmarks.

I often see colleagues with the same many browser windows of many tabs each open struggling to find what they need, and ponder their methods.

The high memory usage is due to the optimization. Responsiveness, robustness and performance was improved by making each tab independent processes. And that's good. Nobody needs 80 tabs, that's what bookmarks are for.

Is there a straightforward way to have one-process-per tab in browsers without using significant amounts (O(n_tabs)) of memory?

They do this stuff.

I’m honestly amazed OP is managing 30 GB regularly. I’d wager it’s a tall tale. It’s sort of perfect troll bait on a forum because you end up with people sounding nuts, defending web browser ram usage, against the common position, that browsers are RAM hogs.