On my system Chrome is only fractionally faster, if at all. What it does is present an incredibly more fluid feel with the way the tabs gently slide out at the edge of your vision, and the fonts seem to be more carefully rendered.<p>Also, when you see the web pages in Chrome you see them with all the ads intact. The pages are designed for ads so they have a more aesthetic impact with a greater variety of detail, color and incident.<p>(On the other hand, it has loaded the page ads and all as fast as Firefox with ads blocked.)<p>Overall it seems to me that 70-75% of the sense of Chrome being better is subliminal, the effect of a better aesthetic impression.
Oddly, Chrome does a worse job of displaying Gmail in my set-up (Windoze) than Firefox. I'm not at all sure why. I can't see my Gmail contacts list at all in Chrome, unless I switch to "older version," while in Firefox I only need to switch to the older version of Gmail to EDIT the Gmail contacts list. (The Gmail contacts list is still largely a broken mess compared to any installed-on-Windows email client I have ever used to keep a contacts list for group emails.)<p>I still mostly prefer to use Firefox, because email is my primary application.
I was an avid Firefox user for years, but one thing which always annoyed me is it becomes a complete resource hog. So I ended up switching to Safari upon the first beta of 4. I hated it at first, I love it now — nice and light, fast as hell, and has Webkit awesomeness!<p>I can't wait for a decent build of Chrome on OSX though, should be fun; <3 the idea of one process for each tab!
I like the simplicity/extra screen space of Chrome. It's like browsing Firefox in full screen (which I never actually did). No toolbars, extra security (even because it's still new and not very popular), and great startup speed.<p>Overall I think it's the bias towards usability in favor of facilities that does it. Even the speed is a symptom of this.
I use Firefox because I'm pretty entrenched in it now, and I know my way around it a bit better (obviously). The extensions mostly keep me though.<p>Chrome is easily a better built and designed browser (maybe because it's newer) and if they could give us extensions I'd have to seriously thing getting used to the UI, and using it.