Perhaps speed is (subconsciously) a more influential factor than we think. I think it is on that basis that Google is rather obsessed with page load times - see

Perhaps speed is (subconsciously) a more influential factor than we think. I think it is on that basis that Google is rather obsessed with page load times - see eg. https://adwords.google.co.uk/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87144&topic=14467 https://adwords.google.co.uk/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87... - and presumably they have empirical data backing their obsession. One thing I don't understand: given that Chromium is under a BSD license, can't Mozilla just incorporate its Javascript engine into Firefox? I'm sure they can pull that off long before losing their huge market share...