I remember other people telling me it was much faster. I don't remember it actually being much faster, but I switched anyway because of horrific memory leak problems with firefox.

I'm back to firefox now.

> noticing how much better it performed compared to firefox

Given that I used Opera's performance as a basis for my statement I guess your comment, instead of being a glowing praise of Chrome, simply reflects very poorly on Firefox.

At the end of the day, Chrome ended up using too many system resources to be a viable option for me at the time. People accused me on occasion of being an Opera fanboy, but, objectively, it was hard to justify why Chrome would need more resources than Opera while delivering significantly less features.