I was using the Chrome browser on my laptop the other day (some browser compat problem). I don't normally use it; Firefox is my preferred browser. I couldn't help but notice how peculiarly laggy it felt to use. It came down to vertical scrolling: this highly common task - for any long article you'll be doing a lot of it - felt jerky and unpleasant. So I did a quick ad-hoc experiment: open up the same web page in both browsers with viewports of the same size, grab the vertical scroll bar, and wiggle it up and and down continuously so the browser is constantly redrawing text.
This is a crop from Process monitor on my desktop machine, which has 8 logical cores, i.e. 4 physical cores with hyperthreading. That means that 100% CPU usage on one core shows up as 12.5% CPU usage. The big wide bump on the left is the CPU usage while I was fiddling with Chrome; the one on the right is Firefox. (The bump in the middle is sqlservr.exe, which wakes up and does meaningless busywork every 60 seconds.) You can see that Chrome uses perhaps 50% more CPU usage on this task than Firefox, with more time spent in the user process and (proportionately) less in the kernel (presumably shifting bits around). Eyeballing an average of CPU usage, Firefox ranged from 6% to 7.5%, while Chrome pegged at 12.5%. Chrome is simply less CPU-efficient redrawing while scrolling, and it's very obvious to my eyes. (I did the same experiment with IE, and it was in the middle, with about 9% CPU.)
I might hazard a guess that Firefox spends more memory on caching bitmaps of the web page, or some similar trick trading off space for time. In any case, it's one of the reasons Firefox is still my primary browser, and also why I'm completely unconcerned about its memory usage. I have yet to encounter significant paging because of Firefox, not least because it's a 32-bit process, limiting its maximum usage, and I have alternately 12G and 4G of memory in my primary desktop and laptop respectively.
Mind you, when I add up the private working set for all 8 chrome.exe processes apparently needed to display this web page, they add up to 86M, only 1M less than my recently restarted firefox.exe session at 87M. (Comparing other memory usage numbers is awkward, as non-working-set memory isn't relevant, while non-private memory would be double-counted with Chrome.)
