When it first took big bites out of Firefox, it wasn't slight at all. I have only my hazy human memory on this, but some pals and I ran a test script at the time. Iirc, Chome would routinely load enough to start reading in 2 seconds while Firefox was more like 6 on average with our site list and went over 10 way too often to ignore.

It had been very easy before that to blame the sites for all the crud they were larding in. But it was like Google's clean, fast search page compared to Yahoo's "junk you don't need" frontpage all over again. Chrome won on speed fair and square.

Thus ends this yarn by one internet fogey.