I use Chrome and Firefox interchangeably. Haven't experienced your issues all that much, but I do run on 16 GB RAM (probably common for gaming rigs, but less common on more casual machines).
As others have posted, check your plugins. They can be real ressource hogs at times. Try disabling some and see if your experience improves.
I don't follow browser development as closely as I follow the development of the web in general, but a co-worker of mine keeps mentioning how the new rendering engine that Mozilla is working on will revolutionize what browsers can render in terms of css animation and will pretty much force the competition to adopt similar drastic optimisation to remain relevant.
I recommend you keep an eye out for future versions of Firefox even if you opt not to use it right now.
EDIT:
Ah, there is the Wikipedia link for it: [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(layout_engine]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(layout_engine[/url])