[snogglethorpe]

> The "many tabs" situation where Firefox performs better than Chrome is more like 50+ or 100+ tabs than 20.

For me it's much sooner... on my work machine with limited memory, firefox is almost always noticeably better after 3-4 tabs, or even fewer when they're memory-hungry sites like gmail. With only 1GB on that machine, I tend to be hyper-sensitive to memory usage, and unfortunately chrome tends to basically use up all memory on the system once I reach 8-9 tabs. FF gets a fair bit further.

The upside of chrome on that machine, however, is that the process-per-tab thing makes much easier to control memory usage: although tabs chew up memory quickly, closing a tab gives you back all the memory it was using, whereas with FF the relationship between closing tabs and giving memory back to the system is much fuzzier....