Maybe you have a different use case than I do; my Chrome instance usually uses about 30% more memory than Firefox despite having a quarter as many tabs open.
Win7. Between eight and ten tabs open, one open to Grooveshark. Everything gets refreshed every eight hours or so. Firefox usually has anywhere between five and a hundred tabs open. Both get rebooted about once every three days for updates. Chrome is at 400MB, FF is currently at 300.
my own experience was that chrome on windows is the best/fastest browser experience available atm, but I don't use it often. have you tried chrome canary or webkit/safari? you seem to have a weird problem - it might be down to a plugin or extension, so I would disable them all and re-enable one-by-one.
chrome://plugins/ - kill flash, enable html5 on youtube, and you will never miss it. been 18 months for me, and I very very rarely find that I need to open a flash-enabled browser
I'm thinking there has to be more overhead with chrome simply due to each tab being its own process. I have left chrome open for weeks before without it screwing things up too badly though, so it seems to be alright.
