Did a side by side comparison between Chrome and IE7 just now. Opened up a bunch of different tabs with websites that had a high amount of content (flash animations, images, other crap , goat porn). With about 6 tabs open Chrome used 9mb less than IE. But it was always 9mb, even after opening the second tab. They used the same right off the bat....not sure what IE is doing with that 9mb.

Chrome loaded just as fast as IE, no different there at all.

After closing all the tabs Chrome did indeed go back to using ~15mb of RAM, whereas IE lingered around 130mb. But when you have 4gb of ram, who frickin cares.

An interesting note, once 6 tabs were open, chrome had two processes that constantly used 20 and 13% of my cpu. So two websites were causing it to do that, whereas IE was right around 1% (if that).

It's a nice alternative I guess, but I'll stick with IE seeing as Chrome wasn't mind blowingly amazing or anything. But good on Google for joining the browser wars.