Chrome is my default browser, it has been for many years, I think it's great, but it has become an increasing burden and is making me concerned.

I have an old development/test machine that runs WinXP with 3GB of usable memory. I used to be able to run Chrome, Firefox, IE and Opera quite happily all at the same time with a whole bunch of tabs open in each. Now, I can only run Chrome (with a whole bunch of tabs) before I'm running out of memory and deep into the swap file (5GB+ is not uncommon). Needless to say, this quickly becomes unworkable.

I perhaps have a few more extensions than I used to, but these don't appear to be using that many resources - at least not as far as I can see in Chrome's Task Manager. And yes, web pages themselves have become increasingly bloated and resource intensive, but I'm talking GB's of memory here not just a few MB's.

Chrome is also the only browser (or application for that matter) that has crashed my machine in recent years, with the old BSOD. (See this thread: [webmasterworld.com...] ) - thankfully this has become a lot less frequent having reduced the number of tabs that open at startup.

Chrome is also the only browser that I've had to reinstall because it became wholly unusable after an update.

Chrome is also the only browser that corrupted all my extensions after a mandatory update and was forced to reinstall them all - losing data in some cases.

Chrome was once prized for its lightweight simplicity (like Gmail - but that's another rant); where has it gone?

Have others experienced this "bloat" as well? Or are you all testing on the latest tech that simply laughs in the face of resource hungry apps? Is this the future - in order to have increased functionality in the browser? (Unfortunately, I think deep down I know the answer to that last one.)

(Sorry to appear "ranting" - I'm not really - just been bugging me for a while.)