Thank you, but your post is somewhat patronizing. Yes, I have accounted for each Chrome process. And you forgot to tick one of the 'we're in denial that FF sucks' boxes...what plugins are you using (aka blame the plugins).
I'm apposed to hacking the settings and installing 32-bit versions. It should give somewhat acceptable performance out of the box. I'm not adding bandaids, FF has wasted enough of my time.
I wasn't suggesting that forcing 32-bit mode was a solution. I was just pointing out that comparing the memory footprint of 32-bit and 64-bit applications is not apples-to-apples.
Also, Mac OS X 10.6 and earlier do not support ASLR for 32-bit applications and ASLR's effectiveness is reduced with a smaller address space.
See Chromium Issue 18323 ("Need more bits: 64-bit Mac version") from 2009: http://crbug.com/18323
I'm apposed to hacking the settings and installing 32-bit versions. It should give somewhat acceptable performance out of the box. I'm not adding bandaids, FF has wasted enough of my time.