As far as I know ff and chrome are about the same speed wise (very little difference). It is true that the bare bones chrome browser is faster than ff, but once you add all the components chrome is missing, they come out to be about the same. I haven't yet had the issue the OP has and I'm using firefox and mabi with like 20 different tabs open on FF and a few other applications all open at the same time and I never lag.
Quote from kingofrunes;439561:
I personally agree with Pride here. I use Chrome for EVERYTHING except testing cross-browser compatibility which is essential in the line of web design work, which includes having to work with that curse of a browser known as IE that continues to plague the internet including IE6!
That's what jQuery is for. Any good jQuery library will usually fix whatever compatibility issues you have with other browsers and it makes life so much simpler.