So, I’ve trained my brain to use chrome as an app only for google websites. When I need to check gmail or YouTube or google calendar, I use chrome. Otherwise I’m on Firefox or safari.
It’s worked pretty well. I found I was only really unhappy with Firefox when using google websites. No longer a problem.
Chrome had SPDY support not just before any other web browser did, but before any open web server did—because Chrome had SPDY support before Google ever documented that there was such as thing as “SPDY.” It was, at first, just turned on as a special Chrome-to-Google.com accelerator, spoken only between that browser and that server, because only they knew it.
I don’t fault Google for this: they’re doing “internal” R&D with protocols, and then RFCing them if-and-when they turn out to have been a good design for at least their use-case with plenty of experimental data to confirm that. Which is exactly how the RFC process is intended to be used: spreading things that are known to work.
It’s just kind of surprising that “internal” R&D, in their case, means “billions of devices running their software are all auto-updated to speak the protocol, and start speaking it—at least to Google’s own servers—making it immediately become a non-negligible percentage of Internet packet throughput.” (Which is a troubling thing to have happen, if you’re a network equipment mfgr, and you expected to have some time while new protocols are still “nascent” to tune your switches for them.)
For a number of sites like YouTube and GMail, it's because of Google. If you change your useragent to look like Chrome, you get served a JS payload that Firefox is fine with, and it is faster.
If your useragent isn't Chrome, they'll serve you a less optimised payload, but which tends to have wider support.
They seem to have made a tradeoff - one that generally isn't necessary under Firefox.
Edit: I am a diehard Firefox user and fall back to Chrome only when I have to because of some weird breakage. One of those is editing within Atlassian's Confluence: find within a Confluence page doesn't work right in FF, and I've often had @name references messed up too upon saving. Chrome works fine.
There’s a good chance my MacBook is not supported properly for Firefox as I’ve run into some internet threads about. But at this point, I’ve settled on this solution. It also makes me spend less time on YouTube once chrome is closed down and I’m solely on Firefox.