I recently transitioned to Safari because I'm really tired of how Chrome hogs memory and drains my battery like crazy. The only thing that has been keeping the Chrome icon open is the Hangouts plugin. Basically, I am looking for the lightest way to run Hangouts on my Mac. By light, I mean the least amount of RAM usage, and preferably a way to do it without Chrome open/light version of Chrome that only opens extensions. Any suggestions?

EDIT: Another thing I noticed was that Hangouts ignores your default browser if links are sent to you by chat, and when clicked they open in Chrome. My question doesn't relate to this at all, but I found it interesting...