So I had to try it on my machine with 4 GB RAM. For context, I already had opened Thunderbird, Sunbird, IRC, Skype, Pidgin, a twitter client, Audacious, an Ope

So I had to try it on my machine with 4 GB RAM. For context, I already had opened Thunderbird, Sunbird, IRC, Skype, Pidgin, a twitter client, Audacious, an OpenOffice document and a spreadsheet, GIMP with 4 large and scribbled on photos, and a good number of terms and gvims. Then I opened Chrome 11. And started opening tabs. After opening 101 tabs (really) spanning 3 windows, I gave up. I had it down to 110 MB physical RAM remaining, but it was slow going. These were real web content tabs of all different pages, not empty tabs. The system in general was still completely responsive, though Chrome was taking about 0.5 seconds to switch tabs as opposed to the normally instantaneous response. So... whether Chrome 11 is a hog really seems to be somewhat system dependent. I do grant it's a significant download compared to the other browsers. I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that Safari uses more native Apple libs than Chrome, and those libs are resident already for the most part. This might account for your differences.