What a difference a couple of years makes.
Since I originally started this thread, successive versions of Google Chrome have gotten bigger, and slower, and less stable on the XO-1.
Today, it has a larger memory footprint than Firefox, both in terms of how much storage space it requires and how much RAM it requires to run.
I find that the latest versions of Google Chrome brings my XO-1 to a crawl, and it also crashes very, very frequently.
As such, I have gone back to using Firefox.
There was an
article on CNET that claimed Google is trying to reverse this trend.
My plea to Google: Release a bare-bones version of Chrome that provides users with basic browsing without unnecessary bloat. No Flash support. No Java support. No plugins support. Lightweight computer users need a browser that's a big step up from Dillo (which really doesn't cut the mustard any more, even for lightweight users) but doesn't eat up all the computer's RAM and CPU.