Here's what I find interesting about that: I tend to run Linux on a bunch of older hardware for various purposes. One of those devices is a netbook with an Atom N450 CPU, in other words a single core dog of a processor that struggles with the lightest of loads. With it running Slackware (which actually makes the netbook usable as a mobile daily driver) Firefox runs circles around Chromium. Granted, neither browser is nowhere near as fast as it is on my daily workstation, but on such an underpowered machine Firefox surprisingly outperforms Chromium by a measurable margin.
Typically it takes about three seconds for Firefox to open on a fresh boot, whereas Chromium takes nearly 20 seconds. This is with the same extensions installed on both browsers, so that's not the issue. Having about five tabs open in either browser, with Firefox switching tabs is nearly instant, whereas in Chromium it takes several seconds to redraw the canvas for the newly selected tab.
Then there's multimedia performance. Firefox can play videos (both webm and Youtube HTML5) without stuttering at 480p and lower resolution, while Chromium chokes on even 360p content in either format.
For these reasons, even though Chrome/Chromium is my normal daily browser in Windows, I happily use Firefox on Linux and other OSes as it just performs better for me.
On my machine there is no hardware acceleration, there is a noticeable lag with rendering and input response in Firefox. Pages load slower, scrolling is not smooth.
I'm curious then, which GPU do you have and if it's AMD or Nvidia, are you using the proprietary driver or the open source driver? I ask because I've had lag and rendering issues under the Nouveau driver that disappeared on the proprietary driver. This is on a modern workstation with a GTX 960 and both Firefox and Chromium were affected.
I've found the Intel Linux driver to be generally slower than the Windows counterpart, and on post-Haswell machines there are still numerous bugs in the Intel driver, so I'm not surprised. It's sad too, given that Intel tries to position themselves as friendly to the Linux community, yet they keep losing Linux devs[1].
Typically it takes about three seconds for Firefox to open on a fresh boot, whereas Chromium takes nearly 20 seconds. This is with the same extensions installed on both browsers, so that's not the issue. Having about five tabs open in either browser, with Firefox switching tabs is nearly instant, whereas in Chromium it takes several seconds to redraw the canvas for the newly selected tab.
Then there's multimedia performance. Firefox can play videos (both webm and Youtube HTML5) without stuttering at 480p and lower resolution, while Chromium chokes on even 360p content in either format.
For these reasons, even though Chrome/Chromium is my normal daily browser in Windows, I happily use Firefox on Linux and other OSes as it just performs better for me.