Chrome and it's open source version chromium obtains it's speed by taking up massive amounts of ram. I personalty don't care as I have 16GB to throw at it to make it run smooth with 100+ tabs open. but to each their own.
On average Chrome used 3 times more ram than Firefox and Firefox uses 50% more Ram that opera.
That Said with the recent HTML 5 things I've been testing just to mess around Chrome wins hands down in the Render performance sector with opera hardly able to keep 15 FPS under lght load and Chrome maintaing a steady 60 under heavy Canvas rendering (provided you have the ram).
all in all it hard to make a definitive "This browser is the best" statement.
Judging by recent experience when it comes to normal usage Chrome, FF, and IE10, all have equivalent performance with Opera and Safari being moderate competators.
Chrome feels snapyer to me (bias non withstanding)
However on my netbook which is by no means a beast of computers( even if it IS a beast of it's class) I would REALLY like a truly 'lite' browser Chrome overloads the ram and it gets compairitvely sluggish (by that I mean it feels like I'm useing IE7). FF ends up pushing the processor to it's limits with any sort of simi heavy javascript (CP's snow for example) that common on more modern websites or flash
so, if a browser had a truly light footprint while having a snappy render speed, even if it didn't support flash I would use it on my more Ram limited computers.