Why is Firefox always mentioned in this context? Sure they have had a history of it, but lately they've been fine and if one compares the combined spawned processes of Chrome, Chrome typically has more memory consumption.
I keep my Firefox up to date with release versions, have few plugins, and still find it absorbing memory at a tremendous rate. Chrome can also use memory, but somehow manages to let it go sometimes, as well as not drag my entire (Windows) system to a stutter.
I guess so many of us mention FF in this context because it still happens to us, even though we gamely continue to use it. But we still love it, and that's why we continue to use it. Though admittedly, most of us have a Chrome on the side...
Remember that when you are accounting for those you also need to remove all of the stuff that is paged into every process and is the same across them, such as shared libraries and the like. Most likely Chrome is using less ram than you think.
Chrome has a built-in task manager that takes this into account, as well as a slightly more hidden "Stats for nerds" link in the task manager that gives total memory usage. It's just genuinely very memory hungry once you add up all its processes.
