I attempted to post this yesterday but my ISP was making like a Yo-Yo — constantly going up and down, mostly down — but I thought data informative, so I am posting it now even though the thread has somewhat moved on.

Admittedly it is a slightly different browser (Safari Technology Preview Release 26 (Safari 10.2, WebKit 12604.1.12), and a different Sierra version (MacOS 10.12.5 beta (16F43c), but Activity Monitor is giving me a more detailed breakdown of memory usage that may be helpful in seeing how much memory Safari uses and for what purposes. For example with four tabs open...
For a total of 532.7MB. So it would seem Plantsowner's 4GB should be more than adequate for her described uses. In fact if my four tabs are typical that would only be an average of 84MB per tab. She could open 6 more tabs and still be using only 1TB 1GB of memory.

Last edited by joemikeb; 04/02/17 08:41 PM. Reason: Change TB too GB thanks to plantsowner
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein