Upgrade to 16GB if you live in your browser

Yes, upgrading from 8GB to 16GB will noticeably improve multitasking with many browser tabs.

The short version: modern browsers are hungry. Chrome alone can eat 500MB-1GB per tab if you’ve got extensions, heavy sites, or YouTube running. Eight gigs gets eaten fast. Once you hit the limit, your system starts swapping to disk—everything slows to a crawl, tabs reload when you click them, and you start hating your computer.

Sixteen gigs gives you enough headroom to keep 20-30 tabs open without that pain. You’ll still hit a wall eventually, but it’s a much higher one. If you’re the type who keeps 50+ tabs open, consider 32GB. But for most people, 8→16 is the single biggest upgrade you can make for a better browser experience.

One caveat: if your RAM isn’t the only bottleneck (e.g., you’re on an old spinning hard drive or a weak CPU), you might not see the full benefit. But a RAM upgrade is cheap and usually the first thing I do on any older machine.

Future you will thank present you the first time you have 15 tabs open without your laptop wheezing.