I'm surprised that Chrome is still so popular. I switched from Chrome to Firefox years ago because I would constantly get tabs crashing, the UI is terrible if you have a large number of tabs open, and the longer you ran it the worse the performance got.
The lack of ability to directly open files always used to bug me as well. The worst thing was that there was a bug/feature that showed Google was looking at it, but they just didn't seem to be able to comprehend that it's sometimes possible to pass a URL to an external app and have it open it directly instead of always sending everything to the download folder (like Chrome itself does for PDFs).
It's less of a problem these days, but using a company intranet site with links to documents was a pain in Chrome and trying to use Citrix clients could end up in a cycle of Chrome redownloading the ica file instead of just running it.
