Personally, I haven't tried Chrome. I might eventually. But Firefox works great and the add-ons are tops. When people are talking about "faster" web browsers they are talking about a couple of seconds AT MOST. I'll make a small list of the add-ons I have and also link you to a site that shows you how to tweak your settings to make Firefox much faster.
Add-ons:
No-script
Mostly for security, can kind of be a hassle but allows you to click on random links with impunity
Adblock Plus
Name should make it fairly obvious, though I just switched to Windows from Mac and have noticed it doesn't do quite as good a job on Windows, still extremely worth it though.
WebMail Notifier
Automatically checks all of your web based email clients for new mail and links you to them
Download Them All!
A fantastic download manager for Firefox. Gone is the lame annoying download window of firefox, here is the faster sleeker version.
Fastest Fox
Better everything in terms of productivity. Preloads next pages, faster searches, definitions ... Just a nice tool in general.
Xmarks
This one is really based on personal preference. I like it because I can manage my bookmarks and passwords much easier between all the PCs I use.
Ubiquity
Their website describes Its purpose as "explore whether a radically different type of interface to the Web — a task-centric, natural-language-based command line — could help us get common Web tasks done faster." Basically it's a command line interface for Firefox, is very quick and very intuitive. Definitely personal taste, but check it out anyway and see if you like it.
That's just a short list of some of the add ons I use.
About:config
I'm just going to link the site here instead of pulling the good stuff from it, that way I'm not responsible if someone dicks up their computer. This site discusses various tweaks you can make to the about:config page of firefox that actually makes quite a bit of difference in speed.
This site probably has more Firefox tweaking than you'll know what to do with, so I'll post the speed ones below.
First, go to your address bar and type in About:config. Now read the warning! This is important.
Once your inside you can use the search bar in there to narrow down the field. These are the tweaks I recommend for speed.
Set network.http.max-connections to 96 – This sets the total number of HTTP connections Firefox can make to a web server. The default value is 30 (raised for the previous default of 24), but if you have ample bandwidth, increase the number speed up the loading of multiple-tab bookmarks.
Set network.http.max-connections-per-server to 32 – The default is 15, but you can raise it to increase the number of connections made to a single server. This is useful if you’re planning on browsing a site while downloading many files from it at the same time.
Set network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to 8 – Raising this setting from 6 to 8 improve performance when working through multiple pages of a site. We don’t recommend setting this value to anything higher than 8.
Set network.http.pipelining to true – Pipelining is an application of the HTTP 1.1 protocol where multiple requests can be sent to a web server before any responses are received. Not all servers support it, but this will improve your browsing speed if you’re on a high-latency (slow) connection.
Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true – Same as the setting above, but only applies if you’re using a proxy connection.
Set network.http.pipelining.ssl to true – If you’re encountering problems with pipelining enabled, the root of the problem may be a broken proxy server sitting between you and the target server. SSL (secure) sites don’t have this problem, so this setting will let you turn on pipelining for those sites only, regardless of the other pipelining settings.
Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 – With pipelining enabled, this preference specifies the maximum number of requests to make to a server at once. Raising the default value from 4 to 8 will speed up your requests to a server, but will cause a small delay if one of the requests fail.
Also, if you want, create a new integer value and call it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set the value to 0. This will tell Firefox to wait 0 seconds to load a page before displaying it on your screen. Makes it feel a hell of a lot faster.
As a side note, and this applies to everyone, not just firefox users, I recommend using openDNS instead of your ISP's DNS servers. Much faster. Tutorial here.
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