Lightweight Browser and System Tweaks questions

Give this a look.

I have chrome but I have a problem with it...my netbook is a weakling but each tab of chrome opens up as a new exe in task manager...which means if im streaming pandora radio my computer becomes almost unusable...not so with firefox and it doesnt seem that way with kmeleon. only problem with firefox is its sick memory usage...my little netbook cant handle it. i heard the new opera and safari are both memory intense too. I was hoping for a lite load on cpu and ram for (mostly cpu since im upgrading ram). I still want basic user interface though..i.e. no text only browsers and stuff like that. What I don't understand about kmeleon is it seems to stutter...most noticeably on this site actually. When I check task manager though it is using low resources; don't really understand that lol.

still thanks for the interesting read though, i use chrome and FF on my desktop all the time!