Safari and Chrome are both WebKit-based browsers. The easiest way for one to be faster than the other is to remove functionality. Until the most recent public version of Chrome, it lacked significant features that I expect in a browser. One of the older feature-challenged development versions of Chrome was benchmarked in the tests mentioned above.Whats the verdict?
This is not the reason that Firefox is slower. Firefox is slower because it is not a binary app. Firefox is an XUL-interpreted app built on top of a small runtime engine. In this regard, Firefox has something in common with Java-based apps and Visual BASIC apps. If you prefer Gecko to WebKit and you also want binary app speed, then you should give Camino a try....
Firefox, although not part of the OP, is roughly 3-4 times slower than Safari overall w/ any add-ons. ...