I find a clean install of Firefox to be almost as fast as Chrome, and in some places more responsive - particularly when opening the browser. Chrome will get the basic UI up on the screen very fast but take a moment before you can interact with it, Firefox is usable the moment it is on screen, even though that time is slightly longer).

Chrome does have preloading of certain things which make loading some things faster although there are addons that can replicate that on Firefox.