When Chrome came out, it was much faster than Firefox.
IIRC, it was also an evergreen browser from the start and you could install plugins without restarting.
It was in many ways a superior product.
It doesn't matter that much anyway - Google didn't make the difference by converting FF users, but by being better than Mozilla at pushing IE users to switch. Which, again, was not a technical issue at all. I would bet that 90% of those users never even tried FF. A lot of them installed Chrome on Windows so they could synchronize settings from their main device, i.e. an Android phone.
At the time I remember this was a huge performance gain on my machine with my workflow (dozens of tabs), since you could easily open up the Chrome Task Manager and see which tab was causing problems. It was also the first browser to make updates invisible, so I installed it on every family member's PC.
Google did to Firefox what it did to Yahoo, Altavista, Excite etc. When you can sell ‘6 minutes Abs’ who would buy ‘7 minutes Abs’?
Chrome was faster when it came out. I was on Win7 back in the days and I was being down voted. The proof is in the pudding.