Firefox’s reputation got hit a decade or so ago by performance problems in popular extensions like AdBlock Plus, and it was common to see people mistake switching to a new browser as the reason for the speed up because the initial performance would be notably better before they loaded the new one up with extensions, too.

There are a lot of people who still think of Firefox from 5 years ago. Whatever else you can say about Mozilla (and I have a lot to say about Mozilla) they have actually really improved performance to where I'm not convinced it's any worse than Chrome. Browsers are just doing more than they used to.

Sorry folks but though i'm just speaking from personal experience, it's what I noticed time and time again. I've given Firefox multiple chances as my default browser over several years right up until maybe a year ago and the same problem presented itself across different laptops and FF versions (many after in those cases someone told me that FF was FINALLY fixed, oops). Were these laptops heavy duty models with serious CPU, GPU, RAM and etc power? Nope, but they shouldn't have to be for just running a browser.

Chrome on the other hand (and believe me I despise Google in so many different ways) has consistently been okay. Not great, but okay, and certainly better than Firefox. This while having the same browsing, tab and extension habits in both browsers.

With comments like my original above I've always seen a bunch of people come out with all sorts of caveats defending or justifying FF, but personal experience has consistently shown me differently.