I really want to like and use Firefox, but the difference (on a top-end computer) is very noticeable and annoying. Perhaps Firefox should work on their perceived speed, if that's the difference.
So you didn't measure it. Worthless opinions as to me on my gaming pc chrome is most definitely slower. Both are opinions and worthless without numbers.
Real world benchmarks show they are neck and neck leap frogging each other all the time, so both of you are wrong; they're generally so close a human can't tell the difference, it's all biases these days unless someone shows you the numbers. Lots of people don't realize the extensions they add can also severely upset performance, but that's on the user. My 4 year old computer works just fine with both of them and 4 or 5 extensions.
It also depends a lot on use cases and available resources. When on a single or just a few tabs, my perception usually favored Chrome, but in real usage I'm often keeping hundreds of tabs open and Firefox keeps being speedy enough most of the time while Chrome becomes unbearable very quickly.
Agreed, with a caveat: on non-Google pages. Google is actively slowing down their pages on Firefox (or at least heavily optimizes them, but just on Chrome - which is the same).