It was eye opening to me when there was mention of a 2 TiB map being created and something about 128MiB chunks. I'd just like to smack the person that thought that was a good idea. I can understand thoughts like "but the blocks won't actually be allocated" or some such, but you have to step back and say "WTF are you even doing with anything that large?" Control freak.
And yes, web browsers are becoming an OS on their own. I consider that a failure of the underlying OSes we have. Tabbed browsers are awesome, but they exist because OSes and standard desktops (GUI toolkits) didn't come up with decent ways to handle that. Browsers are also trying to implement fine grained access to resources - because our OSes haven't managed to do that for them yet. Memory management? I have no idea why you'd do that in ANY application software today. Actually there is a reason - people don't trust the OS or think they can do something better, but it ends up creating extra complexity. Complexity is categorically bad and should be avoided unless it's the only way to do something. Remember how X got its own memory and font management? Same thing.
And yes, web browsers are becoming an OS on their own. I consider that a failure of the underlying OSes we have. Tabbed browsers are awesome, but they exist because OSes and standard desktops (GUI toolkits) didn't come up with decent ways to handle that. Browsers are also trying to implement fine grained access to resources - because our OSes haven't managed to do that for them yet. Memory management? I have no idea why you'd do that in ANY application software today. Actually there is a reason - people don't trust the OS or think they can do something better, but it ends up creating extra complexity. Complexity is categorically bad and should be avoided unless it's the only way to do something. Remember how X got its own memory and font management? Same thing.