People tend to assume that if Firefox 57 or other version will be faster then Chrome, then a lot people would then start to use Firefox instead of Chrome.
As much as I would like to see that its not gonna happen, and I am writing this as a Firefox user.
Remember what 'REAL' Opera 12 did in its times comparing to Chrome or Firefox? It loaded pages faster, used less memory, was most standards compliant and also came with bundled torrent client, and mail client and RSS client and ... and having 100+ tabs opened DID NOT EVEN SLOWED IT!
... and guess what, both Firefox and Chrome had more users while Opera had about 4-5%.
It did not mattered if it was faster or better.
Currently Opera is just a Chrome with different skin, so I moved to Firefox with Midori and Iridium as 'backups'.
I had a few times in past years when I got so irritated by sluggishness of Firefox that I moved to Chromium, despite of the completely unusable tab UI it has when compared to Firefox's (even without addons). Well, it always turned out that Chromium with 8GB RAM and my browsing habits is even worse, so I returned back to Firefox, but if I had 16 or 32GB of RAM it might have turned out to be a different story.
I'm so glad Firefox catches up. Instead of thinking "I wish Chromium had better UI and I had more RAM", I can just be happy with my browser, embracing my workflow instead of trying to adapt it to the available tools.
I wouldn't be that pessimistic. The key difference is that Firefox used to have a lot of market share that it lost to Chrome, whereas Opera never really had any to begin with.
These are stupid benchmarks and chrome devs stopped optimizing after them [1] because they don't matter. Michael (the phoronix guy) makes a living out of automating benchmarks and automated feed aggregation (or mailing lists) and those benchmarks especially add nothing of value to the Browser speed discussion.
As much as I would like to see that its not gonna happen, and I am writing this as a Firefox user.
Remember what 'REAL' Opera 12 did in its times comparing to Chrome or Firefox? It loaded pages faster, used less memory, was most standards compliant and also came with bundled torrent client, and mail client and RSS client and ... and having 100+ tabs opened DID NOT EVEN SLOWED IT!
... and guess what, both Firefox and Chrome had more users while Opera had about 4-5%.
It did not mattered if it was faster or better.
Currently Opera is just a Chrome with different skin, so I moved to Firefox with Midori and Iridium as 'backups'.