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.
