I've just come across and article comparing Chrome and IE8 that has some interesting comments on the resources required to run the two browsers.  Perhaps the uptake might not be as dramatic as we first thought.

This is a big deal for Google, which is banking on wider adoption of its hosted application offerings and battling the perception that browsers are unreliable, especially when you start running multiple web applications in a tabbed format. Nobody wants to trust their line-of-business applications to an unstable environment, so Google hopes that Chrome will provide the kind of robustness that can assuage customers' fears.

So both Chrome and IE8 isolate tabs so that an error on one website doesn't crash all the other tabs you have open.

However, this and other new features mean that both Chrome and IE 8 stretch the limits of current PC hardware by gobbling up enormous amounts of RAM while saturating the system with lots of concurrent execution threads.

This new development sees browsers chewing-up more memory than their host OS. IE 8, for example, consumes 332MB of RAM to render a simple 10-site/10-tab browsing scenario. Not only did the 'fresh start' Chrome use nearly as much RAM (324MB) as the legacy-burdened IE 8 during peak browsing loads, it actually 'out-bloated' IE 8 over the duration of the test, consuming an average of 267MB versus. IE 8's 211MB.

Clearly, these are products targeted at the next generation of PC hardware. With nearly 20 percent of a 2GB PC's memory consumed by web browsing and with IE 8 spinning more than 170 execution threads on Windows Vista to complete the same aforementioned 10-site scenario (Chrome spins a much more conservative 48 threads), we'll need to rethink our ideas of acceptable minimum system requirements. At the very least, you're going to need multiple processing cores and many gigabytes of RAM to support this new, more demanding take on web-centric computing.

It will be interesting to see how they perform once they reach the Release Candidate stage.  if it's the same scenario then the uptake of these new browsers will be constrained by punters have enough grunt in their PC's to take advantage of the new and desirable features.

But that isn't an excuse to not keep your Code Quality score as high as possible !