800 is definitely too much. 100 is normal (the Safari cache will intentionally go up to 256MB depending on how much ram you have installed).
For those who are seeing an improvement in the nightlies (particularly very recently): do you use flash video sites much? youtube, etc...
The reason I ask is that there was an issue where flash videos would use huge amounts of ram and not give it back, which bdash fixed
three days ago. I've noticed moderate improvements even when not using flash video simply due to the same fix applying to ads. This change reduced memory usage on one extreme test case from 400MB to 22MB.
As for whether they'll fix it, it's definitely a major focus. Recently I've been helping test some changes to the custom memory allocator they use that are specifically geared at making sure memory is given back to the system when not in use.
If any of you have a *small* set of pages that reliably trigger very large (>300MB or so) memory use in nightly builds newer than three days ago, please let me know. They would make a good test case.