I've finally gotten tired of Firefox and it's memory issues, or more to the point how it becomes slow to respond to user input once it has consumed over 500mb. I did try resolving the memory issue, but nothing resolved the problem for me.

I took Chrome for a test drive of the weekend, and while it is possibly consuming more memory (I've not done a side be side compare), it is significantly snappier.
Given the significant number of extensions that are available, like Firefox I was wondering what people felt were the must have ones.

So far I've installed and been happy with:
AdBlock
BugMeNot Lite
LastPass
Xmarks Bookmark Sync

Google Quick Scroll
Google Reader Notifier (by Google)
IE Tab
RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) (quickly add an RSS feed to Google Reader)
TinEye Reverse Image Search

and for you web developers, jQuerify, which dynamically loads jQuery into any page you want and also enables you to run jQuery code in the console window

I have some stuff mentioned like AdBlock and LastPass (which is my only must-have extension). Others I haven't seen mentioned:

AutoHD for Youtube - supposedly forces the highest quality for Youtube videos, though I'm not sure if it works

Minimalist for GMail - great customization for removing elements from GMail

Google Voice - easily make calls from my computer and check my inbox instead of going to the voice website

Google Calendar - just a nice quick way to bring up my Calendar

Context Menu Search - right-clicking on highlighted text lets me search predefined search engines (Wikipedia, IMDb, etc)

I don't know if it's true everywhere, but on visits to my site, Chrome is significantly eating away Firefox's share.

I've not noticed any specific issues with Firefox slowing down.

I had a look at some of the sites which I look after and the distribution differs depending on what type of site it is.

For sites which would appeal to the general public then it is around 50% IE, 25% Firefox and 10% Chrome.

For sites which appeal to more technically orientated people then the percentage of IE and Firefox is around 35% each and Chrome is around 15%.

In both cases, Chrome has taken about the same % of users from IE and Firefox over stats from last year.

I'll have to run some stats on the boards here to see where things are at. I never set them up again after the migration to the VPS.

I think it varies install to install, but I had some slowdown that caused me to at least check Chrome out. I happily switched over even before Chrome had extensions because even if Firefox isn't slowed down, Chrome felt faster.

Your numbers are right, though. Chrome actually slowed down a little I think, but I'm sure it'll continue to eat away at the other browsers' shares.

I also try to get my clients to use it because it's more secure. It also automates upgrades for the browser, flash and PDF reading, so they don't have to freak out and call me up when a little box tells them to upgrade something and they worry it's a virus.

I tried Chrome for six weeks or so a while back. I figured I could deal with its quirks if it saved memory. I found that it ended up consuming as much, if not more, memory, and its quirks were driving me nuts. I also didn't find that it was much faster for real-world use.

The quirks mostly came from the very Microsoft-y "if you're not doing it the Chrome way, you're doing it wrong" design of the browser, which extended into the extension API. This was one of my main issues, and comment 29 is a good example of the thought process that keeps me from bothering to try it again.

One weird thing I've found from looking at these stats is that there are people out there who are still using Nutscrape Navigator 4.0. I'm fairly sure these are actually real users as well and not bots pretending to be random user agents. Their machines must just be rammed full of malware and browser toolbars...