Chrome for years and years was sold as lightning fast and secure from malware - and it delivered.
That was why I switched back in the day.
Even today, it has a reputation for being lightning fast, and having a fast pace of development.
In my (admittedly mostly/predominantly) technical circle - I don't know many who switched to ads. In fact, those people are the least likely to click on ads.
Most of them switched because Chrome is fast, and lightweight - or for the non-technical people, because their technical friends told them to.
I've seen technical people switch because of performance, and I occasionally use it for certain tasks too for that reason.
But almost every time I see it on a non-techie computer and ask them something like, "ah, you're using Chrome?", they look at me like I'm speaking a different language. So I suppose they were not aware when they installed it.
I have many tabs open, and did notice high memory usage.
I'll reference my comment elsewhere here - tl;dr - they/we aggressively throttle background tasks now:
> Chrome recently introduced some changes to background tabs (to a bit of grumbling from sites that wanted to use background resources/service workers): > https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background.... > And also - they're aggressively throttling background tabs: > http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr.... > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543 > I'm on Chrome Canary - and there's been noticeable improvements in memory/responsive wise for a few months now. > I have around 320+ tabs open, spread over 2 Chrome profiles (around 160 per profile).