Chrome master race. Firefox is worse. Also, HS should never eat up a ton of resources.
Seriously though, disable TO on HS for a bit to see if it helps. I have a few requests to turkopticon that taking 5+ seconds to get a response back today.
When you try running Chrome on an old netbook with only 2GB of Ram, it becomes REALLY evident how much CPU it uses.
Firefox is slow, true, but it's better at conserving resources.
Midori and Seamonkey are some wonderful lesser known browsers, although they lack extension support.