Don't forget that ISPs have been known (at least in the past) to slow traffic down to certain sites. You shouldn't assume your bandwidth is necessarily routed fairly or anonymously.

As a personal story, a few years ago I was having trouble accessing youtube videos, buffering, timeouts, etc. I couldn't figure out why, tried upgrading my hardware, software, router, everything. But eventually I started suspecting my ISP[1].

I eventually tried using a proxy service to access the youtube videos. I think I routed my traffic through Iceland or something. Low-and-behold, perfect video streams _through_ a proxy routing traffic from another country. I had plenty of bandwidth. My ISP was just throttling my traffic.

Try a VPN, see if your ISP is messing with your traffic.

I don't trust Google either, and they already own me. But I fear my ISP more and don't believe that Google would be intentionally slowing you down. It's probably more of a function that Google optimizes for Chrome, less that they are trying to force you to change browsers.

[1] I will refrain from naming directly, but whose name starts with a 'C' and ends with an 'omcast'

Why would it be a conspiracy theory? It makes sense for Google to make people use Chrome in any way possible.

They are not interested in user privacy for gods sake.

That's not a conspiracy theory; it can be explained without assuming nefarious anti-competitive intent. Google has a front-end framework called Polymer, which it is using to push certain new web standards ("Web Components"). It's also pushing those by implementing them early in Chrome. Since other browsers, Firefox among them, have not yet fully implemented those standards, Polymer reproduces them in Javascript, which is slower than the browser supporting them.

A YouTube developer once said on HN that YouTube uses Polymer for non-technical reasons. One could imagine serving as a testbed for Polymer could be that reason, with slower performance on Firefox as an accepted downside.