Firefox has been improving noticeably faster since Chrome came into the picture. Not just lately either. FF has gotten much faster, much less memory hungry, and added a lot of new features (many inspired by chrome).
I find I use both regularly, and which I use by default changes often, depending on the circumstance. E.g. they're both pretty fast these days, but on different things. FF seems more memory efficient overall, but chrome's per-tab-process thing makes it easier to manually reclaim memory by closing a tab (the per-tab-process also probably makes chrome less able to share memory between tabs, so there seems an inherent tradeoff, and explains FF's win here).
So it seems a virtuous cycle, and chrome's to be lauded not only for a great browser, but for heating up the browser race in a way that seems to have resulted in every browser improving.
I just added fauxbar[0] to chrome, which fixes the worse feature of chrome - the bad history integration when typing in the url bar. I love both, too, but this addition to chrome puts it back in the lead.
The developer toolbar mostly. I do a good amount of web dev so its helpful. Taking pdf screenshots with a single command has come in handy. Also the 3D view is gimmicky but pretty awesome. Tab groups is another favorite.
There still seems to be some sort of memory leakage though. I have to shut down the browser every so often to clear out the 3GB of ram it suddenly decided it needed to have.
Some things Chrome includes that other browsers do not: Pepper, Native Client, Chrome Web Store, WebSQL (Safari might have that one too), a native PDF viewer, SwiftShader, etc.
(People of course disagree on which of those are bad and which are good.)
It's only in the Dartium branch so far, I believe - not in trunk Chromium or release Chrome. But yes, it's another controversial feature that Google is planning to bundle.
Interesting. I can't really tell how fast Chrome starts up, because it's starts in the background when my desktop environment loads and I'm on an SSD. But that would in fact be a good indicator for bloat.
I find I use both regularly, and which I use by default changes often, depending on the circumstance. E.g. they're both pretty fast these days, but on different things. FF seems more memory efficient overall, but chrome's per-tab-process thing makes it easier to manually reclaim memory by closing a tab (the per-tab-process also probably makes chrome less able to share memory between tabs, so there seems an inherent tradeoff, and explains FF's win here).
So it seems a virtuous cycle, and chrome's to be lauded not only for a great browser, but for heating up the browser race in a way that seems to have resulted in every browser improving.