Firefox has improved a lot since Firefox 3.6. Firefox 3.6 was released on 2010-01-21. Firefox 8.0 was released on 2011-11-08. (Chrome 14 was released on 2011-09-16.)
I suggest comparing the latest Firefox (8) with the latest Chrome (15).
(Disclosure: I get paid for working on the engine of Firefox.)
Oops, rereading my post... it was highly ambiguous.
What I meant to say is that in all tests on web sites that I frequent Firefox 3.6 is better (both in terms of speed and memory) than Chromium 14 (which is why I do not understand that everybody says it's faster).
Every time I read news like this I go back and actually measure rendering times for the pages I frequent together with overall memory consumption.
Every time Firefox comes out on top, but yet somebody everybody thinks it is faster and consumes less memory.
(And I am still using Firefox 3.6.*, and Chromium 14)
Maybe I'm different in my browsing habits, but I find that hard to believe.