I use Firefox. It sucks. I keep using it and it keeps sucking and I keep using it... I trust not the google product, but it does work well. Firefox seems happy when it has a lot of memory. All memory in Linux is virtual from the perspective of a process. But unless you access it, it is NOT "mapped" by the kernel. Even if it is mapped, if it is in a page that is not accessed, it _may_ be "paged" in the swap. In that sense, Linux gives you a lot of memory if you can tolerate the switching time from process to process when one of those processes has been "paged" to swap. "Paged" comes from the "pages of memory" (about 4k) that is the minimum chunk the hardware accesses from the RAM at any one time. I have no swap partitions. For what I do, 8 GB or so are fine on the desktop to do everything. I advise people to not use swap unless they have to. When a process dies (is killed by the kernel) due to lack of memory, turn on swap and retry.