That's a good question actually. I only use FF but we use chrome at work and I can tell a definite difference between the two... chrome being the faster version.
I remember last year FF was breaking records on performance. But like many people I use chrome on linux and windows. I think browser wise chrome is killing IE, Edge, Opera and FF single handedly on desktop. Mobile is still up for grabs.
I prefer FF on Android because of the addon support.
Guys, there are some pretty big differences you are neglecting.
Chrome is going to load pretty much everything it can into ram. Firefox is far more conservative with resources.
The other big issue is that chrome has much better HTML5 compliance where as firefox lags behind a bit. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I believe firefox still does not default or force websites to load with HTML5 like chrome does.
Firefox does handle things differently for better security. So things might suffer in the speed department for extra security.
The list can go on for days.
HTML 5 is actually native now, although, whether it implements it well or not is beyond me. I do have my web content caching set to 0mb just for extra security, but I don't know if that also affects performance. I don't care to find out, I prefer if websites don't cache shit on my PC.
They did, for now Firefox runs the browser UI in a separate process from web content. Web contents (multiple tabs/windows) are all running in the same process for now but e10s-Multi feature (which allows 4 content processes) is already implemented and running in FF 54 (beta) so It is probably closer than you think.
Anyway, in my opinion FF is the best browser since it is secure, respects my privacy, has the best extension base and customization options even if it is a little bit slower than chrome. Also Firefox eats less ram and battery (if anyone cares).
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If anyone is interested in tweaking Firefox under the hood, here's a guide.
Type about:config in the address bar and it shows you a lot of tweaks that aren't ON by default, and still applies to the current version of FF. Test it and share your experience.
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This one tells you this custom integer browser.cache.memory.capacity lets you assign a cache size in kilobytes which my first link^ didn't mention, I chose a value of -1 so FF can dynamically cache depending on the ram available.
Why have ram if not for being used. I think 8G machines are pretty standard and more for serious PC users. Who wants a small ram footprint and less performance now ?
Mobile and that about it.
You can test it at HTML5test.com. Chromium gets a noticeable difference than Firefox on my system.
That does sound interesting. Do you know if it will be on by default in Firefox 54 not like in the previous releases of the nightly, where you had to manually turn it on?
I couldn't agree more. 
I wouldn't follow all the "hacks" but enabled pipelining for now to test it out.
Actually the 6th one explains exactly that 
I have to agree. I have 16GB of RAM and I hardly ever go over 8GB, so I don't really mind, if my browser takes a few GB of it, if no other program needs it.
It warned that not all websites supports pipelining and for those that don't support it will degrade performance so I skipped that one but do share.
As far as I know there will be 4 content processes by default but it is possible to change this number in browser's settings.
I see. Why didn't they adjust that number based on CPU cores? 
I don't know maybe they don't want it to eat too much resources or maybe because it is easier to implement/optimize and will be changed in the future. Personally, I don't really care since it is customizable. If you are interested you can read about the project on MozillaWiki:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
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One thing that disappoints me when reading that is that apparently the PDF viewer won't be in its own process yet. That would have been amazing because it constantly keeps freezing up for me when I view a PDF with high res images in it.
Yeah well the multi processing feuture that Mozilla added to firefox since version 51 or so, is kinda interesting.
This feuture should allow better use of system resources.
But to my experiance, somehow my AMD FX8350 cpu doesnt really seem to like it at all.
I get allot of lag on certain websites.
Wenn i disable the multiprocessing feuture, the lag dissapears and everything runs allot smoother for me.
So thats pretty odd.
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That's weird.
I just checked my Firefox in about:config and it said the multi-process feature was active, but the about:config switch wasn't set to true and it didn't feel any better than a year ago. Now I turned the switch on and restarted the browser and now it's noticeably better. I don't know if it's as good as it could be for my system and internet connection, but any progress is great.
You can check if its active, wenn you check task manager.
You should see multiple firefox processes.
I don't know why I didn't have that idea myself. Maybe it's the hot weather here at the moment..
Turns out Firefox has over 60 threads running. 
top -H -p 3220
top - 18:28:03 up 2:47, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 0.11, 0.14
Threads: 64 total, 0 running, 64 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.8 us, 0.1 sy, 0.0 ni, 99.0 id, 0.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 15828920 total, 11454808 free, 2155800 used, 2218312 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 8208380 total, 8208380 free, 0 used. 12759980 avail Mem
PID PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3220 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 2.5 6.7 9:26.05 firefox
3249 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.5 6.7 0:47.92 Socket Thread
3291 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.2 6.7 0:06.56 Cache2 I/O
3296 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.2 6.7 3:06.44 Compositor
3332 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.2 6.7 0:02.41 DOM Worker
3244 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 gmain
3245 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.01 gdbus
3246 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 Gecko_IOThread
3247 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:25.88 Timer
3248 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 Link Monitor
3250 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.10 JS Watchdog
3251 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.81 JS Helper
3252 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:04.05 JS Helper
3253 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.68 JS Helper
3254 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:04.15 JS Helper
3255 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:04.02 JS Helper
3256 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.95 JS Helper
3257 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.93 JS Helper
3258 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.75 JS Helper
3259 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.88 JS Helper
3260 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.76 JS Helper
3261 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.96 JS Helper
3262 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.93 JS Helper
3263 21 1 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 Hang Monitor
3264 21 1 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 BgHangManager
3292 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 DataStorage
3293 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 DataStorage
3295 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 GMPThread
3297 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.27 ImgDecoder #1
3298 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.27 ImgDecoder #2
3299 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.15 ImgDecoder #3
3300 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.11 ImgDecoder #4
3301 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.21 ImgDecoder #5
3302 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.29 ImgDecoder #6
3303 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.43 ImgDecoder #7
3304 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 ImageIO
3305 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:20.60 SoftwareVsyncTh
3310 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 ProxyResolution
3311 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 DataStorage
3312 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:03.22 URL Classifier
3314 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.05 HTML5 Parser
3315 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 IPDL Background
3317 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:02.47 DOM Worker
3318 21 1 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 localStorage DB
3328 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.06 mozStorage #1
3331 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:19.78 ImageBridgeChil
3333 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.76 mozStorage #2
3334 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 Cache I/O
3335 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 mozStorage #3
3338 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 mozStorage #4
3348 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 mozStorage #5
3349 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.10 mozStorage #6
3350 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 mozStorage #7
3351 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 IdentityCrypto
3352 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:00.00 mozStorage #8
3396 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:11.51 threaded-ml
3543 20 0 3813900 1.006g 137632 S 0.0 6.7 0:05.35 mozStorage #9So I guess that means it's working? 
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lolwhut thats allot 
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