Used in combination with compressed swap (ZRAM), it greatly alleviates this problem on the (at least GNOME-based) Linux Desktop.
Still, browser really need to do something about the memory problems they're causing. They're Windows 95-level bad at managing their high memory/leak cases - just leave a browser with more than a few dozen tabs open over night. Especially with a tab that does background fetches (e.g. Facebook or Twitter or something with a lot of timer-driven Ajax queries).
I assert that if it weren't for browsers, there'd be no memory problems on modern desktops.
Yeah. OOM-kill handling wants to be a silver bullet, sort of. For instance, Linux kernel provides
a number of I/O schedulers or net schedulers, etc. to pick from, but OOM kill is "one size fits all".
And it doesn't really look like things are going to change [1][2][3].
