IIRC both Google's and Mozilla's browser metrics showed that a vast majority of users (>90%) never open more than 5 tabs simultaneously. Chrome is optimized for this use case, both from a memory as well as interface perspective. So for most users it works very well, better than the competition I daresay. Unfortunately it tends to completely break down once you go too far out of its comfort zone (i.e. using many tabs). Unless you have immense amounts of memory (> 4 GB) the gigantic memory use will not only affect Chrome itself but also all other programs as the OS starts swapping their pages onto the hard disk (which have to be swapped back upon access which is slow). Additionally, the interface was clearly never intended to be used with too many tabs as it lacks any kind of tab overflow concept. And the interface starts to lack badly which for me is an indication that there are bottlenecks in the single browser process which handles the UI.
Firefox behaves far more gracefully in less regular use cases. With tab groups, switch-to-tab, don't load until selected and tab overflow I can easily have dozens of open tabs without affecting the performance of Firefox and the system too much while remaining quite convenient to use. Mozilla just has to improve the regular use case to be in a better competitive position. Once they've achieved this Firefox will be usable by a far wider range of possible users than Chrome.
Oh, and one of the reasons for Chrome's success (besides the sneaky bundling stuff) is probably the extremely convenient silent updater. I've installed Chrome on many computers which belong to people with little technical knowledge so I wouldn't have to bother with browser updates (users have no say in this) and outdated Flash versions (since it is bundled). Now, the latter reason wouldn't be necessary if Adobe wouldn't be such a bag of fail but that's another topic.
Firefox behaves far more gracefully in less regular use cases. With tab groups, switch-to-tab, don't load until selected and tab overflow I can easily have dozens of open tabs without affecting the performance of Firefox and the system too much while remaining quite convenient to use. Mozilla just has to improve the regular use case to be in a better competitive position. Once they've achieved this Firefox will be usable by a far wider range of possible users than Chrome.
Oh, and one of the reasons for Chrome's success (besides the sneaky bundling stuff) is probably the extremely convenient silent updater. I've installed Chrome on many computers which belong to people with little technical knowledge so I wouldn't have to bother with browser updates (users have no say in this) and outdated Flash versions (since it is bundled). Now, the latter reason wouldn't be necessary if Adobe wouldn't be such a bag of fail but that's another topic.