I wasn't keen on chrome from the security point of view as well as the fact that I like to use refcontrol addon for firefox which effectively prevents the referrer from being sent. I don't see why its necessary for a website to know which website you have just visited. The privacy issue around that is important as well as the security issue. And also being able to switch off flash player with a click of a button really does improve the speed of loading web pages.
I agree with what you say in general, firefox, IE etc have over the years become bloated, but I think that firefox have got it right now. It is currently using 185MB RAM and pretty much nothing on the cpu. It also not much slower than Chrome to load anymore. but one must recognise that everyone has a browser preference. Its about whats important to you. Browsers are kinda like mac versus windows i.e. don't start that war lol.