[michaelmior]

I regularly have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on both Windows and Linux and I haven't experienced the unusably fast (slow?) behaviour you're talking about. That said, Chrome seems much more unstable than Firefox for me lately.

[jacobolus]

My typical browsing has about 50–100 background tabs (stuff kept around to look at later), with spikes up to 300+ (when I’m actively researching something). This kind of usage in Chrome absolutely trashes system performance, especially if any of those tabs happen to have gmail/gdocs/gmaps/g+ stuff in them (ironic, huh?), or other heavyweight sites like facebook. Safari and Firefox mostly don’t have a problem, though restarting the browser once every few days can sometimes help clear up some memory/CPU.