I thought I would give Chrome another crack of the whip: started it up, and have had to kill it due to lack of responsiveness. It's been the same every time I have tried to use it on any machine over the last few years.
As far as speed and speed of broadband goes, obviously a faster internet connection will make browsing faster, but my experience with chrome is that it has always been such a pain to initialise that I can't be bothered. Firefox is not perfect but for me, at any rate, it offers a more satisfactory experience. And as previously mentioned I don't like Chrome's icon-based menus. Just a personal thing, that.