There are people in the comments saying Firefox is super slow compared to Chrome but modern computers are genuinely so fast I can't notice a difference. At least on my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad T61 I use regularly I have to do some comparisons on what the best browser choice is but on my main PC with a Ryzen 5 7600 and 32GB of DDR5 RAM it hasn't even really occurred that one is faster than the other. I use LibreWolf.
I believe you're correct but and maybe it's placebo but there is some process of loading and viewing a web page that feels faster in safari. maybe safari does some sort of pre-fetching? i barely use it so even my anecdotal sample size is not large
In fairness, there's an arbitrary amount of "chrome" on top of Safari, so Firefox could very well be slower. There's also this new profile effect where switching browsers always seems faster. The reasoning is that you're comparing browser A, which is loaded down with all your history, cookies, etc. against browser B, which has a clean slate.