When Google Chrome first came out it was apparent that they had thought long and hard about pretty much everything that goes into a browser. One thing that really stood out to me was that each tab ran in its own process. For most surfers this doesn't mean anything, but the caliber of user that Chrome appeals to, at least when it first came out, wasn't your average surfer. Typically a surfer that would use Chrome was a power-surfer. They had many tabs open at any one time, typically one sites that are very resource intensive. For this type of surfer the one-process-per-tab idea was a boon in the event that any one site misbehaves.
If each tab is a process that means that the operating system is free to work with them as independent processes. Since each tab is a separate process the operating system is free to swap the whole tab out of memory if another process needs memory. This is an interesting side benefit since tabs that aren't being used can be completely removed from memory until they are needed. Contrast this with the all-tabs-in-one-process approach taken by every other browser where the operating system simply swaps out pages of memory that haven't been used recently. In essence, the one-process-per-tab approach gives the operating system a hint as to how best to swap the application.
With all of these positives, there has to be a trade-off somewhere doesn't there? In my experience: yes. As a developer I'm typically running a lot of different applications at any one time, this means lots of memory usage. It seems that when switching to a tab that isn't in memory the whole browser locks up. I don't mean simply that the browser doesn't respond to anything you try to do I mean literally it locks up, I can't switch to another application while I wait.
I'm hoping that there is a fix for this issue in later builds because I've switched to using Chrome when I'm on Windows for all of my normal browsing.
