Memory leak in Google Chrome
I did have that problem for awhile some time ago. For me the problem was mostly with video and 90% of the streaming video on the net is from YouTube. I found that by using the HTML 5 player this is no longer a problem. It has a few other advantages as well, here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/html5/
I too experience constant memory growth (always, no matter which tabs I use) in Chromium on Linux. Eventually, Chromium entirely fills up both my memory and my swap to the point my computer becomes unresponsive. I have to press ctrl+shift+Q and wait a few minutes for Chromium to eventually exit before everything can return to normal.
No such problem in Firefox at the moment.