Up until a couple of weeks ago I was a loyal Chrome advocate. However after the Mozilla team's recent AMA on reddit I decided to switch and since then I really haven't found Firefox inferior at all (aside from a couple of examples like this). So for anyone else looking to make the switch, go for it! The only thing I'm missing about Chrome are the excellent dev tools.
If you are using Windows you might want to give Pale Moon a try, on my system it is much smoother than the official Firefox/Aurora/Nightly.
Pale Moon feels as smooth as the official Firefox does under OS X, for whatever reason the official Firefox for Windows feels terrible on my system (clean profile of course).
Just out of interest, where have you found these performance issues?
The only thing I've noticed was that it really struggled to scroll down large pages whilst playing a video in another window/tab. Although that quickly fixed itself when I updated my graphics card drivers (completely forgot to do so after installing Ubuntu).