I finally got fed up with Firefox consuming an insane amount of memory and CPU while it wasn't doing anything at all and switched to Chrome under my Mac at home and Linux at work, which encompasses about 99% of my GUI computer interaction.

Chrome really is much faster at most things, consuming less CPU and less memory. Notably, Firefox would stutter every ten seconds or so, which was really annoying with any online videos, and Chrome does not have that problem.

The BugMeNot extension for Chrome actually works better than the one for Firefox. Under Firefox, there is absolutely zero feedback from the extension. Under Chrome, it changes the username entry to a dropdown list of all the logins listed on BMN. It's very nice. Someone should "back"port it.

All that said, Chrome is irritating the crap out of me otherwise.

The UI is just terrible.

The window decoration is super-tiny, which makes it a chore to click on, for moving the window or bringing the window to the front. Under Linux, other than colors, it completely ignores the system settings and draws different buttons, in type, number, and design. Also, since the window title bar is gone, the only place that a web page's title shows is in the tab, and if you have more than a scant few tabs, the majority of the title is obscured, so I frequently have no idea what the title of the web page I'm looking at is. (You wouldn't think this would be a big deal — I certainly would have laughed at someone who said that — but it really is. I had no idea how often I looked at web page titles.)

Under Linux with Firefox, I frequently used the ability to select a URL in any application and middle-click to paste the URL into a browser window (not just the URL bar) to load that page. This is very quick, and doesn't work under Chrome. Someone wrote an extension to emulate it, but due to limits in the Chrome API, it requires that a real web page be loaded, which means that you can't do it with a new tab. There are extensions that will open a defined page on a new tab instead of the stupid New Tab page, but then the location bar is not focused when you open a new page, which means that Ctrl-L->type URL no longer works. This affects me dozens of times a day. Not only that, but the bug report/feature request about it is very dismissive of the complaint. (Basically, "whatever; we don't need to support something that every other Unix browser since Netscape 2 has supported." It reads very much like people who simply aren't familiar with Unix.)

All of the ad blocking extensions suck. There's no other way to put it. Basically, they all allow the ads to load, and then they remove them after the fact. This allows onload actions in ads to work, which makes the ad blocking far less effective. I've been seeing a lot of ads since switching, despite using the same filter list.

Seemingly every extension adds a button to the location bar. This wastes an inordinate amount of space.

The Xmarks extension doesn't work well if you have bookmarks with keywords. First, Chrome doesn't support keywords; it has an equivalent feature with it's "Search Engines", but Xmarks doesn't sync keyword bookmarks to there. More importantly, though, it will delete some of your keyword bookmarks. (Also, there are no tags for bookmarks, which I find that I was using more extensively in Firefox than I thought.)

Searching for everything (that isn't immediately obviously a URL) by default is incredibly annoying, and while you can change the search vendor from the default of Google, there's no way to disable it altogether. I had to create a new "search engine" entry that just tries to load the page that I entered. And the error pages are lousy. They are extraordinarily minimal. (Try loading http://this.page.does.not.exist/.) Any details of the error (like "connection refused" or "host not found" or whatever) are, by default, hidden within a collapsed element, so you have to click on the error page to find out what went wrong. (You might argue that this is why search is turned on by default, but that doesn't work for non-public URLs.)

I'm sure there's more, but that's all that immediately comes to mind. That said, none of that has overcome its superior performance.