[mh-]

Speaking as a dev, but from a user's POV, the thing that made jump to Chrome on release day was the immediate recognition that a single bogged down tab did not impact the responsiveness of the chrome (heh) and other tabs noticeably.

I remember, vividly, in Firefox: I would middle-click on a Slashdot link to load it in the background while reading the current one. My focused tab would begin to hesitate and sometimes altogether freeze for several seconds. In Chrome, only the spinning tab would be affected by their bloated DOM.