Thanks for the reply!  I already have that #6 option for "Navigation popups" turned on.  I've had that enabled for a long time.  

@Jdlrobson I see that you aren't the assignee anymore. Is anyone else here working on the drastic memory leak issue? The last activity on the Chromium ticket below was August 2019. There must be a lot of Wikipedia editors out there pulling their hair out when their system grinds to a near-halt due to thrashing and they have no idea why. If it happens to me with 16GB think how bad it is for people with less. I figured it out the culprit was background Wikipedia tabs, after trial and error, but I'm a retired software developer who knew just enough to try to narrow down the problem. This should be a higher than Medium-level priority.

Hello. Just a regular, non-developer Wikipedian here. I found this using a google search. I was surprised to see this as an open issue since 2018. I'm experiencing the drastic memory leaks as described above, causing my 16GB desktop to reach 95% memory usage, grinding the system to a near-halt due to thrashing (it doesn't help this PC doesn't have an SSD). I figured out on my own that only Wikipedia tabs had the memory leak, causing me to come here, and I learned a lot about workarounds to keep my system stable. For that I'm grateful. I noticed that the emphasis recently is to blame Chrome for the problem, but earlier in the discussions it was mentioned that it could be reproduced on Firefox, and Opera. I'm using Chrome Version 92.0.4515.159 (Official Build) (64-bit). I don't use other browsers at the moment. Does anyone know if this happens when using Edge?