... and you can't even find Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370?

Yeah I have the same issue. I've tried various Linux distros (ubuntu based) and they all have the same issue. Chrome is a memory monster. Firefox works like we would expect. Very reasonable memory usage, Chrome though is just as you stated. In fact, I run Linux Mint 16 at the moment. I had 2GB in this notebook. I upgraded to 6GB, just so I could run Chrome...lol. Yes, I upgraded memory - to run a browser...lol. I sort of rely on my Google accounts integration with Chrome, so it's worth it to me. Really, I think the problem is Google. They're not really fond of us Linux users. Googe Drive has no client, and I could go on and on. Although we have some of the best and brightest minds in the Linux community, when it comes to Google, we're sort of just left back until someone somewhere in our community comes to the rescue. Google just really doesn't care. Hence, I believe that's part of our Chrome memory usage issue....

"Nearly every longtime Windows user looks back on Windows XP with a certain fondness, but the party's over according to Microsoft. 'It's time to move on,' says Tom Murphy, Microsoft's director of communications for Windows. 'XP was designed for a different era.' An era where we made good money, but the party's over and we're not makin' no stinkin' money off it no more though it's a perfectly usable OS since we screwed up initially and put a a bazillion updates. Still, it's time to move on to Metro, oh excuse me, Metro with a Task Bar (now). See we've revamped this whole thing. It's all about mobile now and since we're no where to be found in it, we decided to make a desktop OS that looks like it. That way we can feel like we're in the game, though we're not. See it's quite complex but if you really think about it, none of this makes any sense. That's why we're leaving XP behind.

So what do you get for 9 million dollars? A phone call? "HELP! I've lost my folder!". Come on give me a break. The UK govt. has an IT dept. for nearly anything that's going to currently happen to XP. Virus? Microsoft's not helping there really. An AV company perhaps. Microsoft shutting the door on the virus through the OS? Truly if the XP doors haven't been shut by now, there's no shutting them. There's something else going on.