I used to be a Firefox user a couple of years ago and then when I switched to Chrome I noticed a BIG difference in the performance. Chrome was faster and more stable.

Now, similar to the OP I keep having issues with Chrome, the biggest of which is its memory usage.

"Memory usage is off the charts and I frequently have tabs become completely unresponsive."

In my case, it not only eats 2GB of my RAM, but also takes a bit proportion of my hard-disk. I did a quick experiment yesterday and measured my FREE HDD space before closing Chrome and after that.

Before: 800 MB free. After: 10.9 GB free :)

It's true I keep a lot of tabs open (>70), but 10GB.. I think that's too much. Now, I'm considering switching back to Firefox, too.