I recently had a closer look at browser performance and did this report card . As you can see below according to
Peacekeeper and the
Acid Test Chrome is blistering fast, Firefox is in the middle and IE8 is a joke as usual.
I was a long time Chrome user until the latest version of Firefox came out and in spite of the benchmarks Firefox just felt quicker so I changed browser. After using the latest dev version of Chrome for a couple of hours I'm going back to Chrome! It was nice while it lasted Firefox but Google is just doing such a great job of owning the internet and has all the right bits to get my motor going, well i'm sure she will understand.
After using it for awhile I do find that it is faster. It also has a part in settings for importing everything from Firefox so a pretty painless divorce.
I repair PC's for a living now and often install Firefox on clients PC's. On some lower spec hardware Firefox is noticeably faster than IE8. On higher spec PC's the difference is less noticeable. Your average user doesn't care about speed they just want to keep using what they know and don't like to change.