Less than one hour ago I opened a few tabs on Safari. One of them is using 1 GB of ram for some reason. It's version 13.0.5.
What are the reasons behind this? Should I shut it down? Restart? Clear caches? 
Is it normal for Safari tabs to use 1 GB ram
memorysafari
Related Solutions
It's not a setting in Safari, but a general setting. Go to your System Preferences < General and make sure Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps is checked on.
But you can install some 3th party apps too.
- There is SafariRestore, which will basically do the same. But you have to disable the Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps on the screenshot above!
- You can also add the Sessions extension to Safari which will do the same.
I haven't any experience with neither of these apps, so please let me know if it works out!
For what it is worth, I generally recommend to people who don't want to update their OS that they use chrome. Apple only updates safari when they update the entire os, so you are better off with a third party solution for a browser.
(Mavericks came out after this question was posted, so this answer is only effective for people looking for an answer to the question now that it has been released.)
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Best Answer
Safari can be a resource hog, particularly if you have a lot of tabs or windows open to graphics-intense sites, so this doesn't actually surprise me. If you turn on the 'Compressed Memory' column in Activity Monitor — from the menu bar: View → Colums → Compressed Memory — you'll likely see that that most of this memory usage is stuff that's been compressed and shunted off to virtual memory until it's needed.
For a comparison, I've been doing a lot of AppleScripting recently and so Activity Monitor reports that Script Editor is taking up 3.39 Gb of memory, with 2.79 Gb in compressed VM storage. MacOS has sophisticated memory management; as long as you're not seeing strange behavior — e.g. slower than normal response times — you shouldn't have to worry about it.