Personally I have both working fine with hundreds of tabs, but chrome uses 5-10 times the ram.

Hmm. Maybe it's a FF add-on causing the problems for me, though I'm not using anything uncommon. An internal ps like chrome has might help pinning that down.

Chrome is definitely the RAM greedy one (and so many processes!), and always has been.

Firefox has "about:memory", which can give you some rather detailed information about memory usage.

Chrome has chrome://memory-redirect/

Strangely I can't find it in the latest dev release of chrome or chromium, it's still in stable. At least on linux, it also shows firefox's total memory usage, maybe they are doing lots of comparisons.

firefox was stable but the chrome/ux hung if a tab hung. googlechrome was always responsive if a tab went berzerk.

Anybody knows what changed in Firefox?

Maybe the pages got bigger? On my Windows 7 PC, FF still handles a lot more tabs than Chrome, typically 2x or 3x as many.

Where Firefox falls over is with really heavy pages, such as infinite-scrolling image/gif sites. It's much better than it used to be, but it's still vulnerable.

With Chrome, pages fail to load (giving a blank page) and the Flash plug-in crashes. The browser does stay up, but the effect is the same: you have to restart it.