At the time, the argument for Chrome was that Firefox and IE were bloated and their memory requirements were too high.

A system with less than 64 Megabytes of RAM (most computers of the time) would have to lean heavily on spinning rust virtual memory, making everything slow.

However, since then Chrome has become one of the biggest memory hogs that people commonly run.

Chrome was launched in 2008. At that time it was commmon to have 2~4GB of RAM.

Windows Vista, for example, required 512MB but really needed 1GB or more to work.

A year latter, in 2009, Windows 7 was launched, it required 1GB at minimum, but really needed 4GB or more.

I don't think lean memory use was the biggest claim Chrome had made. That was the game between IE and Firefox. Google had specifically promoted faster startup times, faster web browsing experience, and tab isolation / sandboxing so a crashing tab wouldn't bring down other tabs with it.

Ouch. When computers had 64 MB of RAM, Firefox did not even exist yet.