Chromium has been a little dodgy for me lately too. Lots of memory leaks and what not. I've had to kill it's parent process id on a number of occasions (but even then, there's no reason why a browser should take out the whole OS).
Basically, each font in each size uses some handles in a renderer. At 10000 handles, the tab renderer dies. They have a font cache but never clear it.
When enough render processes together use too many GDI handles, the whole Windows desktop breaks down.
I've had problems with fglrx where it crashes because you resize the window too quickly, and then it's done something really funky, so when you do CTRL+ALT+F_N it doesn't actually give you a shell.
I've never once had an application in Linux crash the whole OS - or at least not so long as I've had physical access to the machine (I've had rouge database requests brick a server before because it took down sshd - but that's a different story)
In fact on the laptop I'm on now, the parent link crashed Firefox. But it OOM'ed and got killed before I even noticed there was a problem (and that's on a beefy desktop environment with compositing enabled too)
My bet: the OS and all the code running on it is written correctly. and you can see it gave you a warning about tainted kernel when you loaded that piece of crap nvidia/ati proprietary driver.
And yours is very polite and contribute a lot to the discussion ;-)
but being the devils advocate here, both parents of your comment are not that far off.
Ubuntu is more prone to crash because it invites the user to install much more closed source and proprietary code, by design. so they are not that idiotic and flamebaitic.
You would think, but I've noticed that on HN specifically, the comment pointing out that a stupid argument is forming--if it gets in early enough--tends to be both highly upvoted, and the end of the argument. One reason I like this community.
Crashed my whole system
Chromium 25.0.1364.160 Ubuntu 12.04