Caveat;
I too have become a Chrome fan (Opera not so) , however have spent most of today swearing at Google. They have a *massive* memory leak in all the current versions of Chrome, at least the ones running on Linux. (not tried Windows .. obviously)
If you want to confirm this for yourself, visit the Google visualisations /charts demos and find the "Gauge" demo .. then press the up/down buttons for 3-4 mins .. if you watch "top" on a second Window, it won't be long before that process crosses the 1G memory usage boundary.
(it happens on my new application, spent half a day trying to find the leak in my code .. works perfectly on FF)