Chrome crashes i7 mac mini

Question

I recently upgraded my Mac Mini from a Spring 2009 version to a brand new Oct 2012 model. I've been running the latest OS and apps all along.
My new Mac Mini has a 2.1 GHz quad-core i7 CPU in it, with 16GB of RAM. The older machine had a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU with 8GB of RAM.
Ever since I got the newer Mac Mini, I've been experiencing frequent system freezes and crashes that always seem to be associated with Chrome.
(I was really looking forward to having a machine with 16 GB of RAM because Chrome quickly ate up all of the free memory in my 8GB machine. Now, when I launch Chrome with all of the windows and tabs I usually have open, it quickly ***** up half of my RAM, and before long is using 70%-80% of it.  I use a little app that frees up lost memory, but the best way to resolve it is to just Force Quit Chrome and re-start it. I can't understand why people cannot build browsers that are better at memory management than this!)
Chrome is also now repeatedly displaying pages that say, "Oh, Snap! ______ crashed!" It's almost always one of the video codecs, like Shockwave, Silverlight, or something related.
I'm wondering if there's an issue with Chrome running as a 64-bit app in an i7 CPU?
This is getting really annoying, as it crashes 2, 3, sometimes 4 times PER DAY!
My older machine only crashed 2-3 times PER YEAR.
What's the problem here?  Is there a solution?

Answer 1

If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out these instructions.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Select the most recent panic log under the heading System Diagnostic Reports on the left. If you don't see that heading, select  
View ▹ Show Log List   from the menu bar. Post the entire contents of the panic report — the text, please, not a screenshot. In the interest of privacy, I suggest you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header and body of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.) Please don't post shutdownStall, spin, or hang reports.