I just tried on two popular websites, espn.com and cnn.com, and Firefox was slower to first paint on both, noticeably. No extensions installed on Firefox but a few on Chrome. It's slower.
That's fine, but I wonder if that carries over to most people. There have been plenty of studies that suggest perceivable slowness has a large effect on user engagement. Amazon famously did a study on their website that showed 100ms of latency cost them 1% of sales.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a large percentage of people to whom rendering speed matters. Of course, you'd have to have some frame of reference: if you've never experienced Chrome's faster rendering times, you might not think of Firefox as being particularly slow.
However, I also know that folks like my parents who do not deeply care about IT and performance in general don't really care too much. They do not spend their day in front of the screen like some of us do, but rather look something up once or twice a day. In the greater scheme of things, the difference in rendering times across different browsers doesn't make a measurable difference in their lives.
IIRC there is no significant rendering times differences, there is a perceived difference though. Too bad I don't have the URL of the test but it was featured on HN a little while ago.
Firefox was noticeably faster for me on first paint when I just tried both of those. Caching effects? CDN latency? Some part of the network? Nondeterministic browser behaviors? who knows.
> If somebody gave me a Ferrari for free with the caveat that there's a guy sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all times
I did both in incognito fwiw, it prevent the caching effect. It's not a thorough study, and I'm not concluding that it is, but i'm not doing a study when picking a browser. I just use it and stuff is slow, that's all I have time to try.
