> FF is slower than Chrome (at least the desktop versions).
This is a misconception held by people that haven't used Firefox as of late. I actually frequently encounter crashes in Chrome, whereas I do not with Firefox.
Not it's actually still very slow. Theres a JS demo ever 3 days on HN that runs terribly in FF. Plenty of other 'pushing the envelope' demos do the same thing to FF. To their credit the FF team is usually here, or finds them, and bugs are quickly reported.
The funny thing is, most users don't care about how their browser performs in "'pushing the envelope' demos" - they care about how it performs when they're browsing the web.
No, that shows javscript benchmarks, not the more ambiguous notion of "browser speed".
Anyway, Chrome and Firefox are tied in Kraken, which is the benchmark Mozilla created to simulate real world loads. (And thus, presumably, the benchmark they care most about when optimizing.)