Yeah, I was thinking the 8 GB RAM might be fine if you’re just using Safari, but god help you if you’re trying to use Chrome or Firefox with a bunch of extensions.
Edit: I was curious was my normal browser RAM usage looked like, so here's one data point. On my 14" M3 Pro w/ 18 GB RAM, I have 3 Firefox windows open, 12 total tabs, 2 separate profiles, a handful of extensions between the profiles. The about:memory page for each profile adds up to about 4200 MB of resident memory total.
With a handful of other apps open, Activity Monitor says 15.5 GB of the 18 GB memory is used. (This surprised me!) And those aren't exactly compute-intensive apps either - we're talking things like iMessage, Photos, Discord. (A couple hundred MB of usage does come from a 2nd user which is logged into this laptop but doesn't have any apps open.)
I'm always surprised by modern RAM management. The OS will manage RAM usage based on installed and available RAM, rather than the minimum demands of the software running. If you take an 8GB system and install the exact OS, exact extensions (if any), and run the same programs and open the same tabs as your data point, you will find that the values in activity monitor are completely different, and everything might fit in a 7.5 GB footprint, without even going to swap. The compressed memory value will account for some difference, but not all. Modern RAM management is complex and mysterious and can easily lead users to think they need more than they actually do, because the system is optimizing performance and efficiency to available resources, not just simply allocating resources until they're full like in the old days.
That said, I'm "stuck" on an M1 and a M1 Pro system, both with 16 GB, and I wish I had gone for 32 when I had the chance, simply so I could run more robust virtual machines without going to swap. On the other hand, modern storage can be so fast that swap is generally only a problem if you're worried about SSD wear, and the latest data shows that there's actually nothing to worry about there either.
So what I'm saying is, spring for the extra RAM if you can afford it, but if you can't, don't sweat it, the computer will manage just fine. Activity monitor can give you an idea what's going on with your system, but results won't replicate on a system with a different RAM config.
