Google Chrome starts up way faster than Firefox on every system I have. Not to mention, it just seems to be faster when all I am doing it surfing. But, there are two major concerns for me about Google Chrome's system usage.
The first one is the high amount of hard disk drive usage. The second one is the constant stream of memory that seems to be used by the browser.
Google's Chrome browser spawns a new process for each tab you open. That is by design. The idea is that no one tab can crash the rest of your browser. This is good. This is what Windows is supposed to do with the whole CTRL-ALT-DEL thing. Theoretically, you can terminate the errant process and leave everything else intact. This works for the most part, but really poorly coded programs can get their hooks in a little too deep and take down threads or processes that other programs need, so it is a partial success. None of the other browser work this way. If an ill-coded website takes down one tab in Firefox, Firefox crashes and restarts the whole thing. Luckily, Firefox saves your tabs. Pretty much the same thing happens for Internet Explorer and Opera.
The concerning thing is that each and every one of those processes takes up memory. This is not a big deal if you have four tabs open, but if you are in power research mode, and you have twenty or thirty tabs open, this can be concerning, especially if your computer is supposed to be doing something in the background while you are running your browser.
