There are many of us are Mozilla who focus primarily on performance improvement. The fact is, though, that performance improvements usually are not splashy enough individually to be added to release notes. "Improved performance measure X by 15% in circumstance Y!" is not going to thrill anybody, even if it is important. Please don't take the release notes as representative of where our engineering effort is spent.

I switched back to firefox about 6 months ago now. I'm using nightly, and the built in developer tools are good enough that I don't worry about using firebug anymore. I find the speed pretty good, faster than chrome for some things, slower for others. One area it does shine is implementation of es6 features, and syncing with my mobile firefox browsers.

I hear a lot of firefox hate, and while it certainly used to be true that it wasn't very good, it's no longer true.

When is the last time you used it? Or, what sites do you visit? The current speed of Firefox is quite good. Maybe Chrome could surprise me and be faster. I don't see how, right off.

I've generally found the opposite to be true; Chrome/Chromium have lately been slow as heck and buggy for me on the majority of the computers I've used, whereas Firefox has been less so (but still slow as heck and buggy).

Really, every browser is slow as heck and buggy, so to each his own ;)

That's wierd, I can't notice FF being any slower than Chrome.