When I started using Xubuntu it came with Firefox, but I preferred Chrome and Opera. Since then, Opera’s sync servers have been hacked, causing me to make less use of it and stop syncing data altogether. Chrome has been very good on Windows for me in the past, but seems to have a lot of issues in the Linux edition. Primarily these revolve around the Flash plugin, which often stops or freezes. I find that some tabs quite often put up messages to this affect. At other times without these messages, tabs will simply crash for no obvious reason. It does not take very long before this starts to happen on even the computer with 24 GB of RAM; it can be in as little as 12 tabs when this is happening.
So first of all I tried Chromium, which behaved in exactly the same way, and then I started to test Firefox Aurora. Now not so long ago I tried out Aurora because Opera was giving me some headaches. Well I am not totally sure if Aurora is the best option but I know that it can perform well with a massive number of tabs open. At the moment it is showing no signs of breaking down like Chrome has been. I don’t remember what the other issues were with it more recently that stopped me from wanting to use it for personal stuff. However I am having another go with it because Chrome is not satisfactory at the present time.
I don’t know what is going on with Chrome but I do know I have seen its issues across several of my computers so it is not specific to any one computer, and as mentioned above, having a lot of RAM for it to work in (and it does use a lot, in any case) does not solve the problem. For now, I am therefore working with Firefox Aurora (FFDE) to see if it can do better.