"it short-cuts the long, slow path of VM optimization and gives great performance now instead of five years down the road."

Something tells me that, based purely on usage metrics, chrome matters more than firefox:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2013-02/Squ...

(and pretty much every other metric according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Hi... )