This has been a myth floating around since the early days of Chrome. I am and have for a long time been a big fan of Chrome, but it has never been light weight. It's just fast so people think of it that way. But you've always been able to check on the memory usage of tabs and see it just eating up your memory.

I agree. Chrome has NEVER been lightweight in terms of memory. Each tab is in its own sandbox environment. It will need to load resources separately for each sandbox and that chews up memory.

Chrome may be inefficient with memory but I could manage this by closing the tab. Firefox would retain the memory even after the tab has been closed for some time.

Firefox is a lot better these days.

That seem's to be the desirable outcome, if the trade-off for perceived speed is a larger memory footprint. Users directly feel the speed, but are less likely to be affected by a larger memory footprint.

Just closing the tab isn't enough to release that memory though.

Lets say you have 200 tabs open, check your computers memory usage, close all of the tabs but one and see how much your memory usage drops. Then close that last tab (or fully quit the program on a mac), and see how much memory you get back.

I typically get about 1/4-1/2 of my total RAM back after closing the program entirely.

The half-blank pages you're seeing is a feature that's recently been enabled. This is a case of latency improvement that visually appears to be worse.

When rendering can't keep up with your rate of scrolling, Chrome will display the part that has been rendered so far and display a checkerboard pattern for the not yet rendered part. Previously, Chrome would just flip the display buffers less often if rendering can't keep up.

Oh, hooray, it's mobile Safari!

Yep. In fact, I've noticed performance appearing to get worse and worse in both my Canary browser and regular Chrome. Canary always seems to perform quite a bit worse than regular Chrome. Not sure if that's just due to bugs because of the unstable build, or further changes they're making that is continuously hurting performance.

It also could be that they're making changes and just not optimizing them until they put them in regular Chrome.

But spyder said that he tested on Canary too