Chrome took off because it had the ability to not take 15 minutes to cold boot during the era when firefox did.

I've been using Firefox continuously as my only browser since it was in beta and called Phoenix. This has never been even remotely true, at least on my experience.

To carry on with your anecdotal evidence, I'm going to disagree and say that yes, there was a time where firefox was just dog slow to open - on all 3 of the PCs I owned at the time, two using only 2-3 extensions and one using none. If there wasn't, I never would have switched to chrome.