Also worth noting that Chrome does (or at least, did) cache items even that it is explicitly told not to if they are CSS or JS which can be absolutely infuriating.
I've certainly noticed it breaking the "ctrl+f5 refreshes everything" convention in recent versions, which can be a pain when testing new code and may cause problems for users on the release of new code if you don;t vary filenames (or other parts of the request).
This is for script included using a simple <script> tag, not something that is loaded dynamically, so that isn't the cause.
The solution I've used is to either close and reopen Chrome (yep: close all windows and restart, Google is becoming the new Microsoft in this manner!) or load the script file in a different tab and hit ctrl+f5 there first (it obeys the refresh then, and updates the memory cache that other tabs are using too).
Otherwise it doesn't reload everything. Verify this by watching the Developer Console's Network section. I can only assume this is intentional; my coworkers told me this trick last year and it still seems to be the case.
I still feel Chrome is the best browser, but that's more to do with the lousy competition than Chrome's own quality as of late.
About JS performance: Might be important to you as a gamedev, but for the overwhelming majority of today's web apps this shouldn't be an issue anymore.
That being said, I will probably still switch back to chrome when they get retina support. The interface is just cleaner and it has more intuitive developer tools IMO (safari's are more powerful, but chrome's do have everything I need and are easier to navigate).